KB-Whisper Swedish
Kungliga Biblioteket (National Library of Sweden) Whisper fine-tunes for Swedish.
Kungliga Biblioteket (National Library of Sweden) Whisper fine-tunes for Swedish.
Best for swedish-language transcription where stock Whisper Large is not accurate enough. Pricing: free.
What it is
The KBLab at Sweden's National Library has published Swedish-tuned Whisper checkpoints that materially outperform stock multilingual Whisper on Swedish audio — newsreel, parliamentary debate, and broadcast. The release is part of a broader programme to support Swedish-language AI and is widely cited as the strongest open-source Swedish ASR baseline. Best fit when the buyer is swedish-language transcription where stock whisper large is not accurate enough. The honest caveat: research releases; commercial deployment is integrator's responsibility. As with any open-weights release, the integrator owns hosting, scaling, and SLA — but the licensing cost is zero and the model can be fine-tuned on in-house audio.
Watch out for: Research releases; commercial deployment is integrator's responsibility.
Install / use
huggingface.co/KBLab — Swedish ASR model cardsFeatures
| Speaker diarization | No |
| Word-level timestamps | Yes |
| Streaming / real-time | No |
| Languages supported | 1 |
| HIPAA eligible | No |
KB-Whisper Swedish vs Whipscribe
| Feature | KB-Whisper Swedish | Whipscribe |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Open source | Transcription APIs |
| Pricing | free | free beta |
| Speaker diarization | No | Yes |
| Word timestamps | Yes | Yes |
| Streaming | No | No |
| Languages | 1 | 99 |
| Platforms | Linux, macOS | Web, API, MCP |
Alternatives to KB-Whisper Swedish
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.