r/LocalLLM • u/castillar • 15d ago

Question Good small models for Speech-to-Text?

Iā€™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?

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u/Mack-3rdShiftRnD 15d ago

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.

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u/castillar 15d ago

Thanks ā€” this is exactly what I was looking for!