Whisper

Free tier

OpenAI's open-source speech recognition — best-in-class accuracy across 99 languages.

Free·Technical·Powered by OpenAI·API available·Open source

Key strengths

Multilingual speech recognition and transcriptionTranslation from multiple languages into EnglishRobustness to accents, background noise, and technical languageTrained on 680,000 hours of multilingual and multitask supervised data50% fewer errors than specialized models in zero-shot evaluationOpen-source models and inference code (MIT License)

Completely free

San Francisco, US

Founded 2022

Self-hostable

Facts verified against openai.com on Oct 10, 2026

Get alerts when Whisper changes

Free. We'll email you when pricing, the free tier, API access or open-source status changes.

No ratings yet

Whisper — Developer Documentation & Integration

Whisper is distributed as an open-source project (MIT License) with model weights and inference code available via OpenAI's GitHub repository (110,000+ stars).

Self-hosting: Whisper is fully self-hostable, giving developers complete control over deployment environment, data privacy, and hardware selection.

Model variants: Multiple model sizes are available, allowing developers to balance accuracy against compute requirements for their specific use case.

Core capabilities exposed via inference API:

transcribe — converts audio input to text in the source language
translate — converts audio input to English text regardless of source language
Language detection is handled automatically as part of the multitask training objective

Inputs: Audio files (various formats supported via the inference pipeline)

Licensing: MIT License — permissive for commercial and non-commercial use, modification, and redistribution.

Pricing: Free. No usage fees for self-hosted deployments.

Alternatives