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AI · May 23, 2023

Willow Inference Server: Optimized ASR/TTS/LLM for Willow/WebRTC/REST

Hey HN! Willow Inference Server (WIS) is a focused and highly optimized language inference server implementation. Our goal is to "automagically" enable performant, cost-effective self-hosting of released state of the art/best of breed models to enable speech and language tasks: Primarily targeting CUDA (works on CPU too) with support for low-end (cheap) devices such as the Tesla P4, GTX 1060, and up. Don't worry - it screams on an RTX 4090 too! (See benchmarks on Github). Memory optimized - all three default Whisper (base, medium, large-v2) models loaded simultaneously with TTS support…

Willow Inference Server: Optimized ASR/TTS/LLM for Willow/WebRTC/REST launched on May 23, 2023 with 13 votes, #1,634 of 4,910 launches that month and more than 75% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 3 years on.

In plain words

Willow Inference Server is an optimized inference platform for running speech recognition, text-to-speech, and language models on self-hosted hardware. It supports GPU acceleration on CUDA devices ranging from budget options like the Tesla P4 to high-end cards, and also runs on CPU. The server can load multiple Whisper speech recognition models simultaneously within 6GB of VRAM, with additional language model and TTS capabilities available. It's designed for developers and organizations seeking cost-effective, performant alternatives to cloud-based AI services.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

Open source, local, and self-hosted highly optimized language inference server supporting ASR/STT, TTS, and LLM across WebRTC, REST, and WS - toverainc/willow-inference-server

In the maker’s words, at launch

Hey HN! Willow Inference Server (WIS) is a focused and highly optimized language inference server implementation. Our goal is to "automagically" enable performant, cost-effective self-hosting of released state of the art/best of breed models to enable speech and language tasks: Primarily targeting CUDA (works on…

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