Available models and languages
There are six model sizes, four with English-only versions, offering speed and accuracy tradeoffs. Below are the names of the available models and their approximate memory requirements and inference speed relative to the large model. The relative speeds below are measured by transcribing English speech on a A100, and the real-world speed may vary significantly depending on many factors including the language, the speaking speed, and the available hardware.
| Size | Parameters | English-only model | Multilingual model | Required VRAM | Relative speed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| tiny | 39 M | tiny.en |
tiny |
~1 GB | ~10x |
| base | 74 M | base.en |
base |
~1 GB | ~7x |
| small | 244 M | small.en |
small |
~2 GB | ~4x |
| medium | 769 M | medium.en |
medium |
~5 GB | ~2x |
| large | 1550 M | N/A | large |
~10 GB | 1x |
| turbo | 809 M | N/A | turbo |
~6 GB | ~8x |
Supported Languages
English Chinese German Spanish Russian Korean French Japanese Portuguese Turkish Polish Catalan Dutch Arabic Swedish Italian Indonesian Hindi Finnish Vietnamese Hebrew Ukrainian Greek Malay Czech Romanian Danish Hungarian Tamil Norwegian Thai Urdu Croatian Bulgarian Lithuanian Latin Māori Malayalam Welsh Slovak Telugu Persian Latvian Bengali Serbian Azerbaijani Slovenian Kannada Estonian Macedonian Breton Basque Icelandic Armenian Nepali Mongolian Bosnian Kazakh Albanian Swahili Galician Marathi Panjabi Sinhala Khmer Shona Yoruba Somali Afrikaans Occitan Georgian Belarusian Tajik Sindhi Gujarati Amharic Yiddish Lao Uzbek Faroese Haitian Pashto Turkmen Norwegian Nynorsk Maltese Sanskrit Luxembourgish Burmese Tibetan Tagalog Malagasy Assamese Tatar Hawaiian Lingala Hausa Bashkir jw Sundanese
Whisper's performance varies widely depending on the language. The figure below shows a performance breakdown of large-v3 and large-v2 models by language, using WERs (word error rates) or CER (character error rates, shown in Italic) evaluated on the Common Voice 15 and Fleurs datasets. Additional WER/CER metrics corresponding to the other models and datasets can be found in Appendix D.1, D.2, and D.4 of the paper, as well as the BLEU (Bilingual Evaluation Understudy) scores for translation in Appendix D.3.