OpenAI Whisper
by OpenAI
The reference open-source multilingual ASR model from OpenAI.
Category
Open source
License
MIT
Stars
★ 98.1k
Last push
2026-04-15
Pricing
free
Platforms
Linux, macOS, Windows, GPU
What it is
Whisper is OpenAI's flagship speech-to-text model, trained on 680,000 hours of multilingual audio. The original Python package is the reference implementation — easy to install, but intentionally simple. For production speed you almost always want a derivative (whisper.cpp, faster-whisper, whisperX) that wraps the same weights in a faster runtime. Free, MIT-licensed, runs on CPU or GPU.
Best for: Research, baseline accuracy, teams that want the canonical reference implementation.
Watch out for: Pure-Python inference is slow on CPU; no built-in speaker diarization; batch-only, no streaming.
Watch out for: Pure-Python inference is slow on CPU; no built-in speaker diarization; batch-only, no streaming.
Install / use
pip install -U openai-whisperFeatures
| Speaker diarization | No |
| Word-level timestamps | Yes |
| Streaming / real-time | No |
| Languages supported | 99 |
| HIPAA eligible | No |
Links
Alternatives
Whipscribe is a managed faster-whisper + whisperX service. If you want transcripts without running infrastructure, we're one click away.
Try Whipscribe →