WhisperLive

by Collabora

Real-time Whisper transcription over WebSockets.

TL;DR

Real-time Whisper transcription over WebSockets.

Best for live captioning, meeting bots, low-latency voice agents on self-hosted GPU. Pricing: free.

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

What it is

Collabora's WebSocket server that pipes microphone audio into faster-whisper with a VAD + streaming decoder. Includes browser, Python, and CLI clients. MIT.

Best for: Live captioning, meeting bots, low-latency voice agents on self-hosted GPU.
Watch out for: Faster-whisper backend → CTranslate2 GPU only; English latency ~300ms, multilingual slower.

Install / use

Features

Speaker diarizationNo
Word-level timestampsYes
Streaming / real-timeYes
Languages supported99
HIPAA eligibleNo

WhisperLive vs Whipscribe

FeatureWhisperLiveWhipscribe
CategoryOpen sourceTranscription APIs
Pricingfreefree beta
Speaker diarizationNoYes
Word timestampsYesYes
StreamingYesNo
Languages9999
PlatformsLinux, macOS, DockerWeb, API, MCP

Alternatives to WhisperLive

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.