ESPnet

by ESPnet community

End-to-end speech toolkit: ASR, TTS, ST, speaker, separation.

TL;DR

End-to-end speech toolkit: ASR, TTS, ST, speaker, separation.

Best for reproducing SOTA results on academic benchmarks; recipe-driven workflows. Pricing: free.

Category
Open source
License
Stars
Last push
Pricing
free
Platforms
Linux, macOS

What it is

One of the longest-running end-to-end speech toolkits. Ships pre-trained Conformer, Branchformer, E-Branchformer, and Squeezeformer. Apache-2.0.

Best for: Reproducing SOTA results on academic benchmarks; recipe-driven workflows.
Watch out for: Steep learning curve; shell-script recipes alongside Python.

Install / use

pip install espnet

Features

Speaker diarizationYes
Word-level timestampsYes
Streaming / real-timeNo
Languages supported50
HIPAA eligibleNo

ESPnet vs Whipscribe

FeatureESPnetWhipscribe
CategoryOpen sourceTranscription APIs
Pricingfreefree beta
Speaker diarizationYesYes
Word timestampsYesYes
StreamingNoNo
Languages5099
PlatformsLinux, macOSWeb, API, MCP

Alternatives to ESPnet

Whipscribe is a managed faster-whisper + whisperX service. If you want transcripts without running infrastructure, paste a URL or drop a file in the form below — you'll have a transcript in seconds.