Whisper

Overview Whisper is OpenAI's open source automatic speech recognition (ASR) model — the transcription engine that quietly powers a huge share of the "AI transcript," "AI captions," and "AI meeting notes" products you have used in the last three years. Released in September 2022 under the permissive MIT license and rapidly iterated since (large v3 landed in late 2023, and the API only turbo variant followed), Whisper is genuinely a foundational piece of AI infrastructure rather than a consumer product. There is no Whisper app you subscribe to. There is a research paper, a model on Hugging Face, a self hostable Python package, and — for developers who prefer not to run their own inference — the OpenAI API endpoint at $0.006 per minute of audio. What matters is that Whisper, on the day it shipped, produced open source transcription quality that was competitive with (and in many languages ahead of) every paid commercial ASR service, and it has only pulled further ahead since. What Whisper actually does, cleanly stated, is take an audio or video file — in any of dozens of formats, in any of 99 languages — and produce a transcript. Or a translated transcript (source language in, English text out). Or a subtitle file with timestamps. Or a diarized transcript if you pair it with a separate speaker diarization model. On English, the flagship large v3 model transcribes accurately enough that reasonable quality podcast and lecture audio comes out with word error rates below 5%. On…