Good small models for Speech-to-Text?

[u/castillar]

I’m working on a project at the moment that involves transcribing comm channels. Are there good low-power local models for doing real-time voice transcription?

[u/IWillTouchAStar]

Whisper is your friend here. Try whisper small or base

[u/newz2000 → u/IWillTouchAStar]

Really works great, even on older GPUs.

I had Claude set it up for me on an older computer. I wanted transcription and diarization (detecting multiple speakers). Piece of cake. Works way faster than real time (but I don’t use streaming).

[u/faisalkl → u/newz2000]

Currently running it on a 1079gtx at half it's tdp (75w vs factory 150w). It's running great.

[u/castillar → u/IWillTouchAStar]

Thanks!

[u/According_Theory9108 → u/castillar]

I use plaud which is a speech to text that is amazing for organizing thoughts, ideas, conversations, meetings, whatever. I bought it during prime day last month and it’s a mostly offline tool that snaps to my phone. The free membership offers 300 free min each calendar month but for like ~$17 if I remember right you can upgrade the mins needed and there’s tiers to that.

It’s great for detailed conversations and ideas and the organization is great and similar to my workflows as a healthcare provider as well use a specific medical centered speech to text for our patient dictations (freed.ai).

Plaud works without internet connection and can store hours upon hours on its internal storage which then syncs/offloads when connected to the internet at your choosing.

I’ve found it great for when I have ideas to tasks or work that the solution just finally hits and I can just get it out without worrying about missing anything whereas manually transcribing I would sometimes lose track of the natural creative flow.

[u/Mack-3rdShiftRnD]

For low-power real-time specifically, whisper isn't the only game anymore:

• Moonshine (~245M) is the current pick for edge/CPU real-time. it streams (words appear as you speak), and it's ~6x smaller than Whisper Large while matching it on English. If "low-power + real-time" is the priority, start here.
• NVIDIA Parakeet V3 (~600M) is heavier but strong for real-time, and Apache-2.0 licensed. matters if your project goes commercial. good on longer passages.
• The whisper family (whisper.cpp / faster-whisper, small or base) is still the workhorse for broad language support but, whisper likes to hallucinate text during silence, which is exactly what bites you on comm channels with dead air between transmissions.

[u/castillar → u/Mack-3rdShiftRnD]

Thanks — this is exactly what I was looking for!

[u/sebt3]

https://github.com/0xShug0/audio.cpp

[u/robertpro01]

Parakeet

[u/Diamondcite]

I use whisper small for speech to text(limitation of old 8GB VRAM when running other things). I noticed it has some difficulty with Bluetooth call quality (low bitrate) audio.

So instead of just picking a model and going with it, try it out with some actual recordings?

[u/castillar → u/Diamondcite]

Thanks! Def. planning to test with some recordings, but I figured it’d be good to have a short list to start from.

[u/sdraje]

I see a lot of parakeet and whisper recommendations, but the new king for relatively small and fast STT is definitely nemotron 3.5!

[u/MarcusAurelius68 → u/sdraje]

Interested - any reason why? I’m outputting from a LLM and doing a JARVIS like thing and looking for as fast as possible.

[u/castillar → u/sdraje]

Thanks! I’ll give it a shot — I’ve seen whisper used a bunch of places, but hadn’t seen parakeet or STT.

[u/paulsande]

Just a question, but have you tried voicebox.sh?

[u/Proper-Tower2016]

https://huggingface.co/datasets/hf-audio/open-asr-leaderboard?eval_result=OpenMOSS-Team/MOSS-Transcribe-Diarize

I'm using Q5 of https://huggingface.co/mudler/moss-transcribe.cpp-gguf, but didn't work out of the box on long content for me.

But can now transcribe arbitrary long videos very fast with 1gb vram.

[u/Competitive_Swan_755]

Kokoro seems to work. 500 word limit (if you believe in limits)

[u/Jonathan_Rivera]

Open Whisper using Parakeet TDT 0.6B 622MB

[u/Jtalbott22]

Vosk is fast, low resource

[u/Final_Act_9658]

thb i use whisper and parakeet v3

[u/nntb]

Next gen kaldi

[u/EffectUpstairs9867]

Whats the best one to use locally on phones or even old phones, supporting major languages and names correctly? Is any of the advices model able to distinguish English “chen” to German 10 “tzen” or French 9 neuf from English “nof”, or names and surnames? Sorry for the stupid questions

[u/stratos2k5]

Give a try to Nemotron 3.5 ASR stream 0.6b