openWakeWord

by openWakeWord contributors

Open-source wake-word engine — community alternative to Porcupine and Snips.

TL;DR

Open-source wake-word engine — community alternative to Porcupine and Snips.

Best for dIY voice assistants and Home Assistant Voice setups needing a free wake-word engine. Pricing: free.

Category
Open source
License
—
Stars
—
Last push
—
Pricing
free
Platforms
Linux, Docker, Hardware

What it is

openWakeWord is an Apache-2.0 wake-word detector that runs on Raspberry Pi and Linux. Reference engine in the Home Assistant voice pipeline and an OpenVoiceOS default.

Best for: DIY voice assistants and Home Assistant Voice setups needing a free wake-word engine.
Watch out for: Custom wake-word quality depends on training data; English-first; smaller language coverage than Porcupine.

Install / use

pip install openwakeword

Features

Speaker diarizationNo
Word-level timestampsNo
Streaming / real-timeYes
Languages supported1
HIPAA eligibleNo

openWakeWord vs Whipscribe

FeatureopenWakeWordWhipscribe
CategoryOpen sourceTranscription APIs
Pricingfreefree beta
Speaker diarization—Yes
Word timestamps—Yes
StreamingYesNo
Languages199
PlatformsLinux, Docker, HardwareWeb, API, MCP

Alternatives to openWakeWord

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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.