sherpa-ncnn

by k2-fsa

ASR on NCNN — Android-friendly, CPU-only, no FP support needed.

TL;DR

ASR on NCNN — Android-friendly, CPU-only, no FP support needed.

Best for embedded ARM / Android devices without a usable ONNX runtime. Pricing: free.

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

What it is

Lightweight ASR via Tencent NCNN. Apache-2.0.

Best for: Embedded ARM / Android devices without a usable ONNX runtime.
Watch out for: Fewer models than sherpa-onnx; INT8 quantization mandatory for tiny devices.

Install / use

pip install sherpa-ncnn

Features

Speaker diarizationNo
Word-level timestampsYes
Streaming / real-timeYes
Languages supported20
HIPAA eligibleNo

sherpa-ncnn vs Whipscribe

Featuresherpa-ncnnWhipscribe
CategoryOpen sourceTranscription APIs
Pricingfreefree beta
Speaker diarizationNoYes
Word timestampsYesYes
StreamingYesNo
Languages2099
PlatformsAndroid, iOS, Linux, macOSWeb, API, MCP

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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.