Curiosity · AI Model
OpenAI Whisper v3 (large-v3)
Whisper large-v3 is OpenAI's open-weight automatic speech recognition (ASR) model. It covers 99 languages with strong accuracy on accented and noisy audio, and is released under an MIT-style licence, which is why it anchors most open-source transcription pipelines — from podcast tooling to meeting-notes apps.
Model specs
- Vendor
- OpenAI
- Family
- Whisper
- Released
- 2023-11
- Context window
- 30 tokens
- Modalities
- text, audio
- Input price
- n/a
- Output price
- n/a
- Pricing as of
- 2026-04-20
Strengths
- Open-weight and MIT-licensed — fully self-hostable
- 99 languages with strong accented-speech robustness
- Timestamped word-level output
- Mature ecosystem — whisper.cpp, faster-whisper, Hugging Face
Limitations
- 30-second chunking — long audio needs a segmenter
- Hallucinates on silent or background-only audio — use VAD upstream
- Speaker diarisation must be added separately
- Real-time streaming needs faster-whisper or a distilled variant
Use cases
- Podcast and video transcription
- Meeting notes and action-item extraction
- Subtitle generation across languages
- Voice-note capture for productivity tools
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Score | As of |
|---|---|---|
| Common Voice multilingual WER | ≈10.4% | 2023 |
| LibriSpeech test-clean WER | ≈2.0% | 2023 |
Frequently asked questions
What is Whisper v3?
Whisper large-v3 is OpenAI's third-major-version open-weight speech-to-text model. It supports 99 languages and is released with MIT-licensed weights, so it can be self-hosted for free and fine-tuned.
How accurate is Whisper?
On clean English audio (LibriSpeech test-clean) Whisper large-v3 achieves roughly 2% word-error-rate. On multilingual Common Voice it averages around 10–11% WER, which is state-of-the-art among open-weight ASR models.
Can Whisper do real-time streaming?
Not out of the box — Whisper is trained on 30-second windows. For real-time, use faster-whisper, whisper.cpp with low-latency buffering, or a distilled variant like Distil-Whisper. Deepgram Nova-3 and AssemblyAI offer purpose-built streaming.
Is Whisper free to use?
Yes — the model weights are MIT-licensed and self-hostable for free. OpenAI also offers a hosted Whisper endpoint via its audio API for a per-minute fee.
Sources
- OpenAI — Whisper repo — accessed 2026-04-20
- Hugging Face — openai/whisper-large-v3 — accessed 2026-04-20