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AI · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Whisper ASR

Ultra‑fast, on‑device transcription, up to 20x — CUDA

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

    Build Powerful Voice Agents

    2025 · openai.com · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    A neural net for speech recognition

    2022 · openai.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    Hey HN! Braden here, creator of Whispering, an open-source speech-to-text app. I really like dictation. For years, I relied on transcription tools that were almost good, but they were all closed-source. Even a lot of them that claimed to be “local” or “on-device” were still black boxes that left me wondering where my audio really went. So I built Whispering. It’s open-source, local-first, and most importantly, transparent with your data. Your data is stored locally on your device, and your audio goes directly from your machine to a local provider (Whisper C++, Speaches, etc.) or your chosen…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    Fast voice-to-text on 92 languages

    2023 · lingvanex.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    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 →

  7. 7

    This project is a Windows port of the whisper.cpp implementation: https://github.com/ggerganov/whisper.cpp Which in turn is a C++ port of OpenAI's Whisper automatic speech recognition (ASR) model: https://github.com/openai/whisper The implementation has no dependencies, usually much faster than realtime, and should hopefully work on most Windows computers in the world.

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    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.

    Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    High quality text transcription with OpenAI's whisper on Mac

    2023 · goodsnooze.gumroad.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    Easing the pain of audio transcription

    2023 · transkrip.xyz · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Open-source, local-first dictation you can trust

    2025 · epicenter.so · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    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 →

  13. 13

    $0.15/hr audio transcription API powered by OpenAI Whisper

    2022 · whisperapi.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    Generate English subtitles for videos in any language

    2022 · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    Offline AI Speech to Text Transcription for iOS & macOS

    2025 · whispernotes.app · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    Your audio files too big for Open AI's Whisper? not anymore

    2023 · whisper.trevorhealy.me · its alternatives →

  17. 17
    WhisperUI▲120

    Most affordable text-to-speech and speech-to-text service

    2024 · whisperui.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18
    Dictatofree tier, from $20.82/mo▲93

    I built a macOS dictation app where everything runs on-device. Transcription, auto-correct, translation. No audio or text leaves your machine. It ships with 4 transcription engines you can swap between: WhisperKit (99 languages), NVIDIA Parakeet TDT 0.6B (25 European languages, fastest of the bunch), Qwen3-ASR 0.6B (30 languages), and Apple Speech on macOS 26+. They all run through CoreML/Metal. Whisper is the most versatile, Parakeet wins on raw latency for European languages, Qwen3 does better with CJK. I went with a protocol-based architecture so you pick the engine that fits your…

    Feb 2026 · dicta.to · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    Next-Gen Speech-to-Text with Unmatched Performance

    2023 · deepgram.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    Speech to text with smarter transcription

    2024 · whisperwizard.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    Docker image for a self-hosted Whisper speech-to-text server with speaker diarization and OpenAI-compatible transcription and translation APIs. Powered by faster-whisper. Supports all Whisper models, NVIDIA GPU (CUDA) acceleration, JSON/SRT/VTT output, SSE streaming, offline mode, and multi-arch (am

    Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    A realtime, live transcription and translation app that works locally using a browser. Built with Huggingface Transformer.js and Supabase Realtime. Realtime in-browser speech-to-text with OpenAI Whisper! Broadcast to subscribed clients with Supabase Realtime. Translate to 200 languages with Meta's NLLB-200! Demo & source code https://supabase.link/realtime-ai-yt Shoutout to @xenovacom for building Transformers.js and providing plenty of examples at https://huggingface.co/docs/transformers.js/en/index#example...

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    Local AI dictation for Windows

    Aug 2026 · whisperstream.io · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    Supercharge your transcription workflow using OpenAI Whisper

    2023 · store.getwavery.com · its alternatives →

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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →