Whisper
Whisper is a family of open-source speech recognition models released by OpenAI in 2022, trained on 680,000 hours of audio and covering about 99 languages. Because the weights are freely available, Whisper became the engine inside many local transcription and dictation tools.
Whisper ships in sizes from tiny to large; bigger models are more accurate and slower. It transcribes in batch rather than streaming, so tools that show words live typically pair it with a streaming model and use Whisper for languages the streaming model does not cover.
On Apple silicon, optimized runtimes let even the larger Whisper models run comfortably on-device, which is what made the current generation of private, local Mac dictation tools possible.
In Flit
Flit uses Whisper large-v3-turbo locally for the 74 languages its streaming engine does not cover.
Models in Flit →