Speech to text

Whisper

Speech recognition in 99 languages, including Russian. The de facto standard for transcribing calls and meetings. Hugging Face's faster Distil-Whisper is English only.

Developer
OpenAI, USA
First release
Sep 2022
Latest release
Mar 2025
Sizes
39M – 1,5B
License
Commercial use allowedMIT
Russian
Supported
Ready-made builds
GGUF, MLX (Apple)
Running
On your own serverAlso runs without a GPU
Industries
Customer support, Media and production, Legal
Deploy on your server Hugging Face GitHub

What it does

  • Transcription of calls and video meetings
  • Video subtitles
  • Voice messages to text
  • Meeting minutes

Where it is used

Sales teamsCall centersMedia and bloggersLawyers

Hardware requirements

LaptopLaptop or regular PC, up to 8 GB of VRAM — smaller versions
fits
1 GPUOne GPU with 16–80 GB — mid-size versions
fits
ClusterServer with several GPUs — flagship versions
no versions

Versions

  1. distil-large-v3.5
  2. large-v3-turbo
  3. large-v3
  4. Distil-Whisper (Hugging Face)
  5. large-v2
  6. Whisper

How to run it

On your own serverWeights are downloaded from Hugging Face and served with vLLM (load and API) or llama.cpp (modest hardware). The model then runs in a closed network with no per-request fees.Hugging Face
How much hardware you needCalculate the VRAM for the model size, context length and number of concurrent requests.Open the hardware calculator

I can set this up end to end: pick the model size, deploy it on your server and connect it to your systems. Quantization compresses a model so it takes less video memory and runs on more modest hardware. Answers change slightly, so quality is checked on your own examples.

Frequently asked questions

Can Whisper be used in a commercial project?

Yes. License: MIT. It allows commercial use, but it is still worth having a lawyer review the license before launch.

What hardware does Whisper need?

At minimum: Laptop or regular PC, up to 8 GB of VRAM — smaller versions. Some versions also run on an ordinary CPU, without a GPU. You can calculate the exact VRAM for your model size and context in the hardware calculator.

Does Whisper support Russian?

Yes, Russian is listed on the model card.

Where can I download Whisper and what does it cost?

The Whisper weights are open and free to download. You only pay for the hardware it runs on and for the setup. Source links are at the bottom of this page.

How I deploy it for clients

  1. SelectionI pick the model size for your task and hardware and test it on your examples.
  2. DeploymentI deploy it on your server or in a closed network and provide an API.
  3. Fine-tuningI fine-tune it on your data (LoRA) or connect a knowledge base — whichever is cheaper for the task.
  4. IntegrationI connect it to your CRM, ERP, bot, website or team chat and set up monitoring.

Comparisons

Source: huggingface.co/openai/whisper-large-v3. Data checked against the model card on 22 Sep 2026. Have a lawyer review the license before commercial launch.