whisper.cpp

Name: whisper.cpp
Author: Georgi Gerganov

by Georgi Gerganov

C/C++ port of Whisper — runs on anything, from a Raspberry Pi to Apple Silicon.

What it is

whisper.cpp is a dependency-free C/C++ port of Whisper. No PyTorch, no CUDA — it runs everywhere and is the fastest Whisper option on Apple Silicon thanks to the Metal backend. The project is also the upstream of the popular llama.cpp approach. Perfect when you need privacy-preserving, offline transcription on consumer hardware.

Best for: Offline / on-device transcription, Apple Silicon Metal acceleration, low-RAM targets.
Watch out for: No speaker diarization out of the box; model management is manual; diarization needs external pyannote.

Install / use

git clone https://github.com/ggerganov/whisper.cpp && make

Features

Speaker diarization	No
Word-level timestamps	Yes
Streaming / real-time	Yes
Languages supported	99
HIPAA eligible	No

Links

GitHub repo ↗

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