huggingface/distil-whisper

Health v2 · maintenance only

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Adoption not part of the score

4112 stars · 356 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

Distil-Whisper is a distilled version of OpenAI's Whisper model for English speech recognition, offering 6x faster inference, 49% fewer parameters, and word error rates within 1% of the original. It provides pretrained model checkpoints and training code that run through Hugging Face Transformers (v4.35+).

Use cases

• transcribe english audio to text faster than whisper
• run speech recognition on resource-constrained or mobile devices
• deploy low-latency asr for long-form audio
• fine-tune or train a distilled whisper model
• reduce memory footprint of whisper transcription pipelines

When to choose

• you need english-only transcription with near-whisper accuracy at a fraction of the latency
• you want smaller model weights for on-device or memory-limited deployments
• you already use huggingface transformers and want a drop-in whisper replacement

When to avoid

• you need multilingual speech recognition - use whisper large-v3-turbo instead
• you require the absolute lowest word error rate regardless of speed
• you need a standalone cli or gui app rather than a model library

Facets

library · maturity active

speech-recognition machine-learning deep-learning transformers speech-processing machine-learning artificial-intelligence python cross-platform whisper distillation asr model-weights huggingface-transformers english-speech transcription audio gpu

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="huggingface/distil-whisper")