HuggingFace LightEval
by Hugging Face
Eval harness — includes WER evaluations for ASR.
TL;DR
Eval harness — includes WER evaluations for ASR.
Best for benchmarking Whisper / Canary / Parakeet on standard corpora. Pricing: free.
Category
Open source
License
—
Stars
—
Last push
—
Pricing
free
Platforms
Linux, macOS
What it is
A lightweight benchmark harness covering many open-source ASR models. MIT.
Best for: Benchmarking Whisper / Canary / Parakeet on standard corpora.
Watch out for: Newer than alternatives; coverage growing.
Watch out for: Newer than alternatives; coverage growing.
Install / use
pip install lighteval
Features
| Speaker diarization | No |
| Word-level timestamps | Yes |
| Streaming / real-time | No |
| Languages supported | 99 |
| HIPAA eligible | No |
HuggingFace LightEval vs Whipscribe
| Feature | HuggingFace LightEval | Whipscribe |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Open source | Transcription APIs |
| Pricing | free | free beta |
| Speaker diarization | No | Yes |
| Word timestamps | Yes | Yes |
| Streaming | No | No |
| Languages | 99 | 99 |
| Platforms | Linux, macOS | Web, API, MCP |
Alternatives to HuggingFace LightEval
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