OpenAI Whisper

Open-source speech-to-text, run locally free

What OpenAI Whisper does

  • Open-source speech-to-text, run locally free
  • 99+ languages and translation
  • Robust to accents and noise
  • Powers countless apps

OpenAI Whisper — straight answers

What is OpenAI Whisper?

OpenAI Whisper is listed under Speech & Transcription Engines, in the AI Models & Local Execution category on Flocci AI Tools. Open-source speech-to-text, run locally free. It is free, with no paid plan attached, and it lives at github.com.

Is OpenAI Whisper free?

OpenAI Whisper is listed as fully free — there is no paid tier attached to it in the catalog. That makes it one of the 115 entries on Flocci AI Tools with no upgrade path built in.

What can OpenAI Whisper do?

OpenAI Whisper does 4 things the catalog singles out: Open-source speech-to-text, run locally free; 99+ languages and translation; robust to accents and noise; powers countless apps.

What is the best free alternative to OpenAI Whisper?

NVIDIA Parakeet is the closest free alternative: it sits in the same Speech & Transcription Engines sub-category and is free. WhisperX, AssemblyAI and Deepgram also start free. The full list is on the alternatives page.

See the full list →

OpenAI Whisper alternatives

Compare all alternatives →

Deepgram

Speech & Transcription Engines
freemium
  • Fast, accurate speech-to-text API
  • Real-time streaming and diarization
  • Voice-agent building blocks
  • Free credits to start

AssemblyAI

Speech & Transcription Engines
freemium
  • Speech-to-text with audio intelligence
  • Summaries, topics and sentiment
  • Speaker diarization
  • Free tier for developers

NVIDIA Parakeet

Speech & Transcription Engines
free
  • Tops the Hugging Face Open ASR Leaderboard with 6.05% average WER at 0.6B params
  • CC-BY-4.0 license, free for commercial and non-commercial use
  • RTFx ~3,386 — extremely fast inference relative to accuracy

Mistral Voxtral

Speech & Transcription Engines
freemium
  • Apache 2.0 open-weight models (24B and 3B) downloadable from Hugging Face
  • Built-in Q&A/summarization over audio, not just raw transcription
  • Function-calling directly from voice input for agent workflows

Speechmatics

Speech & Transcription Engines
freemium
  • Free starting credit with no card required, 56+ language support
  • Model-training discount program cuts costs 33% for data-sharing customers
  • On-premises/VPC deployment for privacy-sensitive enterprise use

Soniox

Speech & Transcription Engines
freemium
  • Real-time speech-to-text priced well under typical competitor rates
  • Combines transcription + translation in one streaming API call
  • Diarization and speech translation bundled at no extra cost

Head-to-head comparisons