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Work · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Moonshine Open-Weights STT models – higher accuracy than WhisperLargev3

I wanted to share our new speech to text model, and the library to use them effectively. We're a small startup (six people, sub-$100k monthly GPU budget) so I'm proud of the work the team has done to create streaming STT models with lower word-error rates than OpenAI's largest Whisper model. Admittedly Large v3 is a couple of years old, but we're near the top the HF OpenASR leaderboard, even up against Nvidia's Parakeet family. Anyway, I'd love to get feedback on the models and software, and hear about what people might build with it.

Moonshine offers open-weights speech-to-text models that achieve lower word-error rates than OpenAI's Whisper Large v3, built by a six-person startup. The models support streaming transcription and rank near the top of… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier.

  1. 1

    Hi HN, OpenAI recently released a model for automatic speech recognition called Whisper [0]. I decided to reimplement the inference of the model from scratch using C/C++. To achieve this I implemented a minimalistic tensor library in C and ported the high-level architecture of the model in C++. The entire code is less than 8000 lines of code and is contained in just 2 source files without any third-party dependencies. The Github project is here: https://github.com/ggerganov/whisper.cpp With this implementation I can very easily build and run the model - “make…

    2022 · github.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    Kitten TTS is an open-source series of tiny and expressive text-to-speech models for on-device applications. We are excited to launch a preview of our smallest model, which is less than 25 MB. This model has 15M parameters. This release supports English text-to-speech applications in eight voices: four male and four female. The model is quantized to int8 + fp16, and it uses onnx for runtime. The model is designed to run literally anywhere eg. raspberry pi, low-end smartphones, wearables, browsers etc. No GPU required! We're releasing this to give early users a sense of the latency and voices…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    Build Powerful Voice Agents

    2025 · openai.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    I built a voice agent from scratch that averages ~400ms end-to-end latency (phone stop → first syllable). That’s with full STT → LLM → TTS in the loop, clean barge-ins, and no precomputed responses. What moved the needle: Voice is a turn-taking problem, not a transcription problem. VAD alone fails; you need semantic end-of-turn detection. The system reduces to one loop: speaking vs listening. The two transitions - cancel instantly on barge-in, respond instantly on end-of-turn - define the experience. STT → LLM → TTS must stream. Sequential pipelines are dead on arrival for natural…

    Mar 2026 · ntik.me · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    Hi HN! Since the launch of JigsawStack.com, we've been trying to dive deeper into fully managed AI APIs built and fine tuned for specific use cases. Audio/video transcription was one of the more basic things and we wanted the best open source model at this point it is OpenAI's whisper large v3 model based on the number of languages it supports and its accuracy. The thing is, the model is huge and requires tons of GPU power for it to run efficiently at scale. Even OpenAI doesn't provide an API for their best transcription model while only providing whisper v2 at a pretty high price. I…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    Luke from ElevenLabs here. We just released Scribe Realtime v2, our new real-time Speech to Text model. We rebuilt it from the ground up around a new architecture that uses predictive transcription – it anticipates the next likely word before it’s spoken. That makes it both fast (around 150 ms latency) and highly accurate. Scribe v2 Realtime outperforms every low latency transcription model across 30 commonly used EU and Asian languages – 93.5% accuracy, compared to Gemini 2.5 Flash (91.4%), GPT-4o MiniTranscribe (90.7%), and Deepgram Nova 3 (85%). It supports 90+ languages including…

    2025 · elevenlabs.io · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    High performance in a 24b open-source model

    2025 · mistral.ai · its alternatives →

  8. 8MO

    Hey HackerNews, Today I'd like to share my open source project, Moonshine! Pretrained vision models are a popular way to reduce how much data you need and to speed up training, but for remote sensing (i.e. aerial, satellite) it can be a challenge to find good weights. Why use Moonshine? 1. Pretrained on multispectral data: Existing popular CV packages are nice to use but are trained on ImageNet or similar, meaning that not only is the domain of the pretraining different, but you may be restricted to only 3 channels. For remote sensing platforms with multispectral data, this might be a…

    2023 · moonshineai.readthedocs.io · its alternatives →

  9. 9WM

    Try it out! https://glhf.chat/ Hey HN! We’ve been working for the past few months on a website to let you easily run (almost) any open-source LLM on autoscaling GPU clusters. It’s free for now while we figure out how to price it, but we expect to be cheaper than most GPU offerings since we can run the models multi-tenant. Unlike Together AI, Fireworks, etc, we’ll run any model that the open-source vLLM project supports: we don’t have a hardcoded list. If you want a specific model or finetune, you don’t have to ask us for it: you can just paste the Hugging Face link in and…

    2024 · glhf.chat · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    Next-Gen Speech-to-Text with Unmatched Performance

    2023 · deepgram.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Generate English subtitles for videos in any language

    2022 · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    Hi HN! We're Gabriel & Viraj, and we're excited to open source TensorZero. To be a little cheeky, TensorZero is an open-source platform that helps LLM applications graduate from API wrappers into defensible AI products. 1. Integrate our model gateway 2. Send metrics or feedback 3. Unlock compounding improvements in quality, cost, and latency It enables a data & learning flywheel for LLMs by unifying: • Inference: one API for all LLMs, with <1ms P99 overhead • Observability: inference & feedback → your database • Optimization: better prompts, models, inference strategies • Experimentation:…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    The most expressive Text to Speech model ever

    2025 · elevenlabs.io · its alternatives →

  14. 14
    Inworld TTSfree tier, from $25/mo▲318

    Hey HN, this is Igor, one of the engineers behind Inworld Runtime, which we're releasing today in public preview. We built it to solve the common problem we and our customers had: engineers spend more time on AI ops and plumbing than on actual feature development. This was often due to the challenge of using Python for I&#x2F;O-bound, high-concurrency workloads and complexity maintaining pipelines with streams that use always-changing ML models. Our solution is a high-performance runtime written in C++ with the core idea of defining AI logic as graphs. For instance, a basic voice-to-voice…

    2025 · inworld.ai · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    First TTS model to support all 22 Indic languages + English

    2024 · its alternatives →

  16. 16
    OpenWispr▲190

    100% local open source AI speech-to-text model

    2025 · openwhispr.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    The most accurate streaming speech model for voice agents.

    Mar 2026 · assemblyai.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    Free AI transcription: convert video and audio to text, translate into 120 languages, download SRT, VTT, ASS or TXT, or export the video with subtitles on it.

    2022 · freesubtitles.ai · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    A few years ago, right after high school, I decided to try to make a simultaneous translation app for Android as a side project, it took longer than expected (about 2 years) and I had to make a lot of compromises (I had to use Google's API and therefore make users use a developer key because at the time there were no free solutions for speech recognition and translation that had good quality). At the end of university, I decided to pick it up again and finally, using OpenAi's Whisper for speech recognition and Meta's NLLB for translation (with both running locally on the phone), I managed to…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20
    Voxtral▲201

    Frontier open source speech understanding models

    2025 · mistral.ai · its alternatives →

  21. 21
    RunInfra▲156

    Describe the AI model you need and get an optimized AI

    Jul 2026 · runinfra.ai · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    Hi HN! Last year the project I launched here got a lot of good feedback on creating speech to speech AI on the ESP32. Recently I revamped the whole stack, iterated on that feedback and made our project fully open-source—all of the client, hardware, firmware code. This Github repo turns an ESP32-S3 into a realtime AI speech companion using the OpenAI Realtime API, Arduino WebSockets, Deno Edge Functions, and a full-stack web interface. You can talk to your own custom AI character, and it responds instantly. I couldn't find a resource that helped set up a reliable, secure websocket (WSS) AI…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    Welcome to Project S.A.T.U.R.D.A.Y. This is a project that allows anyone to easily build their own self-hosted J.A.R.V.I.S-like voice assistant. In my mind vocal computing is the future of human-computer interaction and by open sourcing this code I hope to expedite us on that path. I have had a blast working on this so far and I'm excited to continue to build with it. It uses whisper.cpp [1], Coqui TTS [2] and OpenAI [3] to do speech-to-text, text-to-text and text-to-speech inference all 100% locally (except for text-to-text). In the future I plan to swap out OpenAI for llama.cpp [4]. It is…

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    Our goal with this project is to build a completely open source, state of the art turn detection model that can be used in any voice AI application. I've been experimenting with LLM voice conversations since GPT-4 was first released. (There's a previous front page Show HN about Pipecat, the open source voice AI orchestration framework I work on. [1]) It's been almost two years, and for most of that time, I've been expecting that someone would "solve" turn detection. We all built initial, pretty good 80&#x2F;20 versions of turn detection on top of VAD (voice activity detection) models. And…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

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