README.md

---
license: other
license_name: mixed-see-below
tags:
  - automatic-speech-recognition
  - translation
  - whisper.cpp
  - ctranslate2
  - vrstt
---

# vrSTT models

Model weights for [vrSTT](https://github.com/kittynXR/vrSTT) — local speech-to-text
for VR and streaming. Everything vrSTT runs is here so the app can fetch the one
model a user chose, verify it, and never touch the network again.

**This repository redistributes third-party models. It trains nothing and
modifies nothing except file format.** Licences differ per directory and are
stated below; the upstream terms travel with the weights.

## Layout

```
manifest.json                       # what the fetcher reads first
whisper/ggml-<name>.bin             # whisper.cpp ggml format, one file each
translation/<name>/                 # CTranslate2 format, a directory each
```

`manifest.json` carries a `sha256` and a byte count for every file. The fetcher
verifies both before handing a path to whisper.cpp or CTranslate2 — a truncated
ggml file otherwise fails at load with an error about magic bytes, which sends
you looking at the wrong thing.

## What is here

**Speech recognition** — [whisper.cpp](https://github.com/ggerganov/whisper.cpp)
ggml conversions, byte-identical to
[ggerganov/whisper.cpp](https://huggingface.co/ggerganov/whisper.cpp). Mirrored
rather than linked so the bytes vrSTT downloads are pinned and hashed.

`tiny`, `tiny.en`, `base`, `base.en`, `small`, `small.en`, `medium`,
`medium.en`, `large-v1`, `large-v2`, `large-v3`, `large-v3-turbo`

vrSTT defaults to **`small.en` for commits and `base.en` for live previews** —
the split is deliberate, previews are allowed to be wrong and are replaced within
a second, so they should not spend the larger model.

**Translation** — [NLLB-200](https://ai.meta.com/research/no-language-left-behind/)
converted to CTranslate2 with `ct2-transformers-converter --quantization
float16`, from `facebook/nllb-200-*`.

`nllb-200-distilled-600M` (default), `nllb-200-distilled-1.3B`, `nllb-200-1.3B`

float16 rather than int8 because CTranslate2 can cast **down** at load time but
not up — one artifact serves both, and converting to int8 here would cap quality
for everyone. 600M is the default because vrSTT's stated minimum-VRAM target is
8 GB, and a 1.3B model beside the ASR stages and a game does not fit
comfortably there.

## Licences — read this before redistributing further

| Directory | Licence | Commercial use |
|---|---|---|
| `whisper/` | **MIT** (OpenAI Whisper; ggml conversions by Georgi Gerganov) | permitted |
| `translation/` | **CC-BY-NC-4.0** (Meta AI, NLLB-200) | **NOT permitted** |

**NLLB-200 is non-commercial.** Redistribution is allowed with attribution and
the licence must travel with it — which is what this section is — but neither
Meta's weights nor anything derived from them may be used commercially. If vrSTT
ever becomes a paid product, the translation models have to be replaced rather
than relicensed.

NLLB-200 also carries Meta's own caveats, which apply unchanged here: it is
research work, not certified for production translation, it was trained on
Wikimedia-domain text and does not target long-form or domain-specific input,
and translation quality varies widely by language pair. Mistranslations can
carry real consequences and vrSTT displays them live on a stream — the
`include_original` setting exists so the source text stays visible beside the
translation for exactly this reason, and it is on by default.

## Citation

Whisper — Radford et al., *Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak
Supervision*, OpenAI, 2022.

NLLB-200 — NLLB Team et al., *No Language Left Behind: Scaling Human-Centered
Machine Translation*, Meta AI, 2022.