LOADING DATASHEET
GROUNDED IN REAL HUMAN CONVERSATIONSYOUR BENCH
Whisper Small
◆ OPEN
by OpenAI
OPEN WEIGHTSLOCALSMALLCHINA-MADEUS-MADEAGENTS
RANKED #16 OF 20 AUDIO · OVERALL #342 OF 6,558 · VIBE SCORE 5.3 · 29 VOICES
whisper-small-quantized.w8a8 on Hugging Face (automatic speech recognition). 2,043 downloads. Open weights for local or hosted use.
HAPPY8.2
1 mentions
SAD6.8
3 mentions
VIBE TRAJECTORY
26 weeks · 38 voices
TOO QUIET
Not enough weekly voices to call a trend yet.
HOW TO USE IT
Open weights. You can use a hosted service, or download it and run it yourself, free.
RUN IT ON YOUR OWN MACHINE
Open weights: download Whisper Small once and it's yours. No subscription, no rate limits, works offline.
244M parameters, FP16 is about 480 MB (Q4/INT8 GGML file is around 150-250 MB)
- BARE MINIMUM
Intel Core i5-8250U laptop (Integrated Graphics / CPU)
8 GB RAM
~$160 USEDwhisper.cpp Q4/Q5 quantized on CPU, ~2x real-time transcription
- SWEET SPOT
Apple Mac mini M2 (8-core CPU / 10-core GPU)
8 GB UNIFIED MEMORY
~$450 USEDwhisper.cpp or WhisperKit with Metal acceleration, ~12x real-time transcription
- FULL POWER
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 12GB PC
12 GB VRAM
~$280 USED CARDfaster-whisper / PyTorch FP16 batch transcription, ~35x real-time transcription
LEARN HOW TO SET IT UP
RUNS INWHISPER.CPPFASTER-WHISPEROPENAI WHISPER CLIBUZZMACWHISPER
WILL MY BOX RUN WHISPER SMALL?
The three cards above are researched picks. Search the machine you actually have — we only say yes if it should reply at a usable speed, not just load the weights and crawl.
HARDWARE PICKS & PRICES ARE RESEARCHED FROM THE LIVE WEB AND REFRESHED AUTOMATICALLY. TREAT THEM AS BALLPARK, NOT GOSPEL.
WHAT CAN YOU ACTUALLY DO WITH IT?
Everyday jobs on each of those rigs: how long Whisper Small takes, and how good the crowd says it is at that kind of work.
| THE JOB | BARE MINIMUMIntel Core i5-8250U laptop (Integrated Graphics / CPU) | SWEET SPOTApple Mac mini M2 (8-core CPU / 10-core GPU) | FULL POWERNVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 12GB PC |
|---|---|---|---|
| Narrate a scripta minute of spoken audio | ~30 S★★★★★ | ~5 S★★★★★ | ~2 S★★★★★ |
| Transcribe a recordinga ten minute recording turned into text | ~5 MIN★★★★★ | ~50 S★★★★★ | ~17 S★★★★★ |
STARS ARE THE COMMUNITY SCORE FOR THAT KIND OF WORK, DOCKED FOR HOW SQUASHED THE WEIGHTS GET AT EACH TIER. TIMES ARE COMPUTED FROM RESEARCHED SPEEDS. BALLPARK, NOT GOSPEL.
WHAT THE INTERNET SAYS
Not enough discussion about Whisper Small yet to call it. We found 29 posts but people did not say much either way.
26 POSTS · 3 COMMENTS · X · LEMMY · REDDIT · GITHUB
PEOPLE LOVE
- No fan mail yet. The crowd is still warming up.
PEOPLE COMPLAIN ABOUT
- No complaints yet. The internet is still looking for one. Suspicious.
LOOKING FOR AN ALTERNATIVE?
Other models the crowd has fully reviewed, starting with audio models like this one.
- Kokoro TTS7.3Kokoro · Audio2.9k VOICESCOMPARE
MiniMax Music 3
ElevenLabs Music
nemotron 3.5 asr streaming 0.6B> SOURCES (12)
- REDDIT · 2023-03-11 · 157 UPVOTESSimultaneously running LLaMA-7B + Whisper Small on M1 Pro
Simultaneously running LLaMA-7B + Whisper Small on M1 Pro
- REDDIT · 2026-03-09 · 22 UPVOTESOllama speed ruined after upgrading to 0.17.7
Ollama speed ruined after upgrading to 0.17.7
- LEMMY · 2026-06-25 · 7 UPVOTESDo you host your own AI?
Do you host your own AI?
- REDDIT · 2024-06-21 · 2 UPVOTESComment in r/ollama
Comment in r/ollama
- GITHUB · 2026-09-02 · 1 UPVOTESFix Whisper decoding and add layered encoder support
Fix Whisper decoding and add layered encoder support
- X · 2026-08-15 · 0 UPVOTES@_watzon The new SpeechAnalyzer on macOS 26 is surprisingly good. Independent benchmarks already put it in the same clas
@_watzon The new SpeechAnalyzer on macOS 26 is surprisingly good. Independent benchmarks already put it in the same clas
- GITHUB · 2026-08-30 · 0 UPVOTESDocumented LYRICS_API__URL_TEMPLATE example raises KeyError and silently falls back to Whisper (2.5x slowdown)
Documented LYRICS_API__URL_TEMPLATE example raises KeyError and silently falls back to Whisper (2.5x slowdown)
- GITHUB · 2026-09-02 · 0 UPVOTESMake Candle Q8 Whisper CPU inference outperform matched FP32
Make Candle Q8 Whisper CPU inference outperform matched FP32
- GITHUB · 2026-09-01 · 0 UPVOTESMatch Whisper generation limit on retained long German greedy window
Match Whisper generation limit on retained long German greedy window
- GITHUB · 2026-09-03 · 0 UPVOTESfeat(asr): add bundled local Whisper small fallback
feat(asr): add bundled local Whisper small fallback
- GITHUB · 2026-09-01 · 0 UPVOTESAdd NB-Whisper (Norwegian Whisper fine-tunes) as whisper variants
Add NB-Whisper (Norwegian Whisper fine-tunes) as whisper variants
- GITHUB · 2026-09-05 · 0 UPVOTEStest: align ASR fixtures with layered Whisper runtime
test: align ASR fixtures with layered Whisper runtime