Whisper

Whisper is OpenAI's open-weights speech-to-text baseline, free under the MIT license for self-hosting and still listed as `whisper-1` in the Audio API...

9/10Top-tier

Active

MonthlyFree self-host / OpenAI transcription API $0.003-$0.006 per minuteAnnualGPT-Realtime-Whisper $0.017 per minute

Best plan

Free self-host / OpenAI transcription API $0

Risk: Whisper is still excellent for self-hosted batch work...

Try Whisper free

Editorial · no paid placements

Should you use it?

Whisper is OpenAI's open-weights speech-to-text baseline, free under the MIT license for self-hosting and still listed as `whisper-1` in the Audio API docs. For new hosted builds, compare GPT-4o Transcribe at $0.006/minute, GPT-4o Mini Transcribe at $0.003/minute, GPT-4o Transcribe Diarize for speaker labels, and GPT-Realtime-Whisper at $0.017/minute for streaming STT. Pick Whisper for local/offline batch transcription; use newer hosted models or specialist APIs when accuracy, streaming, diarization, or latency matter more.

Buy ifSelf-hosted multilingual transcription
PickFree self-host / OpenAI transcription API $0.003-$0.006 per minute; GPT-Realtime-Whisper $0.017 per minute
Skip ifReal-time streaming transcription (batch-first architecture)

Plan guidance

What to buy

Best planFree self-host / OpenAI transcription API $0.003-$0.006 per minute; GPT-Realtime-Whisper $0.017 per minute

Watch: Whisper is still excellent for self-hosted batch work...

Price rangeFree self-host / OpenAI transcription API $0.003-$0.006 per minute; GPT-Realtime-Whisper $0.017 per minute

$0.003-$0.006/min for GPT-4o transcription models; $0.017/min for GPT-Realtime-Whisper streaming STT

Upgrade only ifNot for real-time streaming transcription (batch-first architecture)

Whisper is still excellent for self-hosted batch work...

Current pricing source: OpenAI API pricing

Fit

Use it for this, skip it for that

Best for

Self-hosted multilingual transcription
Batch processing long recordings locally
Building transcription into products via API
Accents and noisy audio where local control and review matter

Avoid if

Real-time streaming transcription (batch-first architecture)
Speaker diarization out of the box (use GPT-4o Transcribe or third-party wrappers)
Live consumer apps that need word-level latency under 1 second

Watch out: Whisper is still excellent for self-hosted batch work, but new hosted builds should compare gpt-4o-transcribe, gpt-4o-mini-transcribe, gpt-4o-transcribe-diarize, and GPT-Realtime-Whisper before defaulting to whisper-1.

Recent changes

Only what affects the decision

Jun 10, 2026
OpenAI transcription and realtime STT APIs
Reverified....
OpenAI API pricing
May 13, 2026
OpenAI transcription API
Reverified....
OpenAI API pricing
May 10, 2026
OpenAI transcription API
Verified: whisper-1 $0.006/min, gpt-4o-transcribe $0.006/min, gpt-4o-transcribe-diarize $0.006/min, gpt-4o-mini-transcribe $0.003/min
OpenAI API pricing

Alternatives

Best swaps

ElevenLabs

The top-ranked AI voice platform in June 2026. Eleven v3 covers 70+ languages with expressive audio tags, Flash v2.5 hits ~75ms

$0-$990/month · 9.3/10 Cartesia

Real-time voice stack for agents. Sonic-3.5 TTS and Ink-2 STT now form the default Line model pair for eligible voice agents, wi

$0-$239/month + credits · 8.5/10 Fish Audio / OpenAudio S1 + S2

Open-source TTS with S2 Pro quality, S2.1 Pro API access, and low-cost cloud/API pricing for expressive speech.

$0-$75/month · 8.5/10

Build comparison

Proof and score mathVerified Jun 25

Proof

Why this recommendation is trusted

EvidenceOpenAI Whisper GitHub

Source: Registered source
Freshness: Review due
Confidence: Low confidence
Verified: Jun 25, 2026
Review: Sep 10, 2026
Volatility: Volatile

Stale source whisper-pricing.

Editorial score

Unweighted average of 4 axes · confidence high

Utility9/10
How much real work it can do for a competent operator, end to end.
Value10/10
What you get for the dollar relative to the closest alternative.
Moat8/10
How hard it would be for a competitor to replicate the underlying advantage.
Longevity9/10
How likely the product is to still be best-in-class 24 months out.

Verified facts

Best ForOpenAI's MIT-licensed Whisper code and model weights remain the default self-hosted speech-to-text baseline for batch transcription, multilingual speech recognition, translation to English, and local/offline pipelines.
mediumDrifts2026-06-25OpenAI Whisper GitHub
Pricing AnchorOpenAI public pricing lists gpt-4o-mini-transcribe at $0.003/min and gpt-4o-transcribe at $0.006/min. OpenAI's API pricing page also lists GPT-Realtime-Whisper streaming STT at $0.017/min ($0.00028/sec).
mediumVolatile2026-06-25OpenAI API pricing
Watch Out ForWhisper is still excellent for self-hosted batch work, but new hosted builds should compare gpt-4o-transcribe, gpt-4o-mini-transcribe, gpt-4o-transcribe-diarize, and GPT-Realtime-Whisper before defaulting to whisper-1.
mediumVolatile2026-06-25OpenAI speech-to-text docs

3 months agolast commit

Full review notesLong-form details, FAQ, and source history

OpenAI’s open-weights speech-to-text baseline. Whisper shipped in September 2022 as a transformer model trained on 680,000 hours of multilingual and multitask supervised audio. Its code and model weights remain under the MIT license, and OpenAI’s hosted docs still list whisper-1 in the Audio API.

As of June 25, 2026, Whisper is no longer the default hosted recommendation for every OpenAI transcription build. OpenAI’s current transcription docs list GPT-4o Transcribe, GPT-4o Mini Transcribe, and GPT-4o Transcribe Diarize alongside whisper-1, while the API pricing page also lists GPT-Realtime-Whisper for streaming STT. Whisper stays important because it is the MIT self-host option and compatibility baseline; GPT-4o Transcribe is the hosted accuracy path, Mini is the budget path, Diarize is the speaker-label path, and Realtime Whisper is the live-audio path.

Recent developments

June 25, 2026: Reverified OpenAI speech-to-text docs and pricing. The docs still list whisper-1, gpt-4o-mini-transcribe, gpt-4o-transcribe, and gpt-4o-transcribe-diarize on the transcription endpoint with a 25MB file limit. Public pricing lists GPT-4o Transcribe at $0.006/min, GPT-4o Mini Transcribe at $0.003/min, and GPT-Realtime-Whisper streaming STT at $0.017/min.
May 13, 2026: Reverified OpenAI API pricing. gpt-4o-transcribe at $0.006/min and gpt-4o-mini-transcribe at $0.003/min remain on the public pricing page; whisper-1 and gpt-4o-transcribe-diarize remain callable via the /v1/audio/transcriptions endpoint per OpenAI’s speech-to-text docs even though they are no longer listed on the public pricing table.
May 2026: OpenAI’s current speech-to-text docs list GPT-4o Transcribe, GPT-4o Mini Transcribe, GPT-4o Transcribe Diarize, and whisper-1 on the transcription path. Diarize supports speaker-aware diarized_json on /v1/audio/transcriptions; it is not yet supported in the Realtime API.
April 2026: Self-hosted Whisper remains the open-weights baseline. The OpenAI repository now documents six model sizes including turbo, an optimized large-v3 variant for faster transcription with some accuracy tradeoff.
March 2025: OpenAI shipped GPT-4o Transcribe and Mini Transcribe as hosted successors on the same /v1/audio/transcriptions endpoint. Whisper-1 stays callable by model ID; MIT weights are unchanged.

System Verdict

Pick Whisper if you need multilingual transcription with the option to self-host, or a $0.006/minute API compatibility baseline. Self-hosted under the MIT license gives offline volume, local control, and a widely understood baseline for batch transcription.

Skip it for new hosted builds that need the best OpenAI transcription model, diarization, or low-latency realtime sessions. GPT-4o Transcribe is the higher-accuracy hosted route, GPT-4o Transcribe Diarize adds speaker labels for non-realtime HTTP transcription, and GPT-Realtime-Whisper or specialist providers fit live transcription better.

Who pays which tier: Self-host free for researchers, privacy-first teams, and batch jobs. Use whisper-1 for compatibility when your stack depends on it, but confirm current account billing. Use GPT-4o Mini Transcribe at $0.003/minute for cost-sensitive hosted production, GPT-4o Transcribe at $0.006/minute for better hosted accuracy, GPT-4o Transcribe Diarize when speaker labels matter, and GPT-Realtime-Whisper at $0.017/minute when live audio is the job.

Key Facts


Model	Whisper open-weights family; largest classic model is 1.55B parameters, with `turbo` as an optimized large-v3 variant
License	MIT (weights and reference code)
Hosted successors on same API	GPT-4o Transcribe, GPT-4o Mini Transcribe, GPT-4o Transcribe Diarize
Realtime STT route	GPT-Realtime-Whisper at $0.017/min ($0.00028/sec) on the API pricing page
Languages	99
API pricing	GPT-4o Transcribe $0.006/min · GPT-4o Mini Transcribe $0.003/min · GPT-Realtime-Whisper $0.017/min
Self-host cost	Free (MIT) plus GPU compute
Max file size (API)	25MB per request; split long files client-side
Formats accepted	mp3, mp4, mpeg, mpga, m4a, wav, webm
Output formats	whisper-1 supports json, text, srt, verbose_json, and vtt
Timestamps	OpenAI transcription API supports structured timestamp output; self-hosted Whisper workflows often use wrappers for word-level alignment
Speaker diarization	No native self-host Whisper diarization; GPT-4o Transcribe Diarize or third-party wrappers fill the gap
Real-time streaming	Use Realtime transcription models for live audio; self-hosted Whisper remains batch-first

Every data point above verified on 2026-06-25 via OpenAI’s Whisper repository, Whisper research post, OpenAI API pricing, speech-to-text docs, and realtime transcription docs.

What it actually is

A family of transformer speech-recognition models that take audio in and emit text. The open repository now documents tiny, base, small, medium, large, and turbo variants. large-v3 remains the classic quality reference; turbo is an optimized large-v3-derived model that trades a little accuracy for much faster transcription.

The moats compound:

Open weights. MIT license. Downloadable from OpenAI’s GitHub or Hugging Face. Runnable anywhere.
Multilingual depth. 99 languages trained together, not a patchwork of per-language models.
Community runtimes. faster-whisper, whisper.cpp, whisperx, mlx-whisper, and others deliver the speed gains the reference implementation lacks.
Baseline status. Every transcription tool in the last three years benchmarks against Whisper. Most wrap it.

When to pick Whisper

Self-hosting is a hard requirement. Air-gapped environments, healthcare audio, legal transcription where PHI cannot leave the perimeter.
Batch processing beats real-time. Podcast archives, meeting recordings, video subtitling pipelines.
Multilingual audio. 99 languages in one model. No per-language routing logic.
Building a transcription product. MIT license lets you ship commercial products without royalty.
Accents and noise matter, and you can review outputs. Field recordings, mobile audio, and conference rooms with poor acoustics still need human QA, but Whisper gives you a local baseline you can tune with preprocessing.

When to pick something else

Real-time streaming transcription: OpenAI Realtime transcription, AssemblyAI, or Deepgram. Self-hosted Whisper’s batch-first design fights against sub-second latency.
Speaker diarization bundled: GPT-4o Transcribe Diarize on the OpenAI HTTP transcription endpoint, or whisperx as a self-host wrapper.
Word-level timestamps: OpenAI’s transcription API supports structured timestamp output; self-hosted Whisper users often reach for Whisper-Timestamped or whisperx.
Podcast recording + editing: Descript wraps transcription with a transcript-first editor.
Translation alongside transcription: Whisper’s translate task covers English targets only. For other targets, pair transcription with a separate translation model.

Pricing

OpenAI API (via /v1/audio/transcriptions):

Model	Price	Notes
whisper-1	Confirm current account billing	Legacy Whisper-1 remains in OpenAI speech-to-text docs; MIT self-host equivalent is free
gpt-4o-transcribe	$0.006/min	Modern successor, improved low-resource language accuracy
gpt-4o-transcribe-diarize	Confirm current account billing	Speaker-aware `diarized_json`; HTTP transcription endpoint only
gpt-4o-mini-transcribe	$0.003/min	Cost-sensitive tier
GPT-Realtime-Whisper	$0.017/min	Streaming speech-to-text route on OpenAI’s API pricing page

Self-host weights at github.com/openai/whisper and on Hugging Face. Managed Whisper hosting via Replicate or Hugging Face Inference Endpoints runs $0.003-$0.01/minute depending on model size and batching.

Prices verified 2026-06-25 via OpenAI API pricing and OpenAI API pricing. The public pricing table currently lists gpt-4o-transcribe, gpt-4o-mini-transcribe, and GPT-Realtime-Whisper; whisper-1 and gpt-4o-transcribe-diarize remain documented on the transcription endpoint, so confirm current account billing before building procurement around those model IDs.

Against the alternatives

	Whisper (self-host)	OpenAI API whisper-1	AssemblyAI	Deepgram
Price	Free + GPU	$0.006/min	$0.37/hour (~$0.0062/min)	$0.0043/min
Open weights	MIT	No	No	No
Languages	99	99	99	50+
Real-time	No	No	Yes	Yes (lowest latency)
Diarization	Via wrappers	GPT-4o Transcribe Diarize	Native	Native
Best viewed as	Open-source baseline	Managed Whisper	Real-time specialist	Low-latency streaming

Failure modes

Hallucinated text on silence. Whisper is prone to generating plausible-sounding text when the audio contains long silence or non-speech. Mitigations: VAD preprocessing (Silero VAD), chunk with overlap, or move to GPT-4o Transcribe which handles this better.
No word-level timestamps in base model. Use whisperx or Whisper-Timestamped forks for word-accurate alignment.
No speaker diarization natively. Add pyannote, whisperx, or switch to GPT-4o Transcribe Diarize.
25MB API file cap. Long recordings need client-side chunking.
Large-v3 is compute-heavy. Real-time on CPU needs small or tiny variants with quality tradeoffs; use faster-whisper + quantization for 5-10x speedup.
English bias. Accuracy is strongest on English, weakest on low-resource languages. Vendor-reported multilingual numbers mix across tiers.

Methodology

This page was produced by the aipedia.wiki editorial pipeline, an automated system that ingests vendor documentation, verifies pricing and model details against primary sources, and generates the editorial analysis you are reading. No individual human wrote this review. Scoring follows the four-dimension rubric at /about/scoring/. Last verified 2026-06-25 against github.com/openai/whisper, OpenAI Whisper research post, OpenAI API pricing, OpenAI public API pricing, OpenAI speech-to-text docs, and OpenAI realtime transcription docs.

FAQ

Is Whisper free?

Yes, when self-hosted. The model weights and reference code are under the MIT license. Downloadable from OpenAI’s GitHub or Hugging Face. You pay only for compute. The OpenAI-hosted API costs $0.006 per minute of audio.

How accurate is Whisper?

Whisper accuracy depends heavily on language, audio quality, speaker overlap, domain vocabulary, and runtime settings. OpenAI positions GPT-4o Transcribe as the higher-accuracy hosted successor, while self-hosted Whisper remains strong when local control, preprocessing, and manual review are part of the workflow.

What's the difference between Whisper-1 and GPT-4o Transcribe?

Whisper-1 is the hosted API model tied to the 2022 open-weights Whisper family. GPT-4o Transcribe is OpenAI’s higher-accuracy hosted successor on the same transcription endpoint at $0.006/minute. GPT-4o Transcribe Diarize is the current speaker-label route, GPT-4o Mini Transcribe is the $0.003/minute budget route, and GPT-Realtime-Whisper is the $0.017/minute streaming STT route.

Can Whisper do real-time streaming transcription?

Not in the self-hosted open-weights workflow. The base model is batch-first: it expects complete audio chunks. For real-time, use OpenAI Realtime transcription, AssemblyAI, or Deepgram.

Does Whisper do speaker diarization?

Not natively. Options: (1) wrap it with pyannote.audio or whisperx for open-source diarization, (2) switch to GPT-4o Transcribe Diarize on the OpenAI API, or (3) use a commercial tool that wraps transcription with built-in speaker labels.

What languages does Whisper support?

99 languages in a single multilingual model. English and major European languages hit the highest accuracy tiers. Low-resource languages (Swahili, Bengali, Tamil, Khmer) trail commercial specialists but remain usable. GPT-4o Transcribe closes some of the low-resource gap.

Category: AI Voice
Also see: ChatGPT (the hosted Whisper entry point) · Descript (transcript-first editor wrapping Whisper) · ElevenLabs (voice synthesis pair)

Sources

OpenAI Whisper GitHub: MIT license, open model family, turbo variant, setup, model sizes, local usage
OpenAI Whisper research post: original training scale, multilingual/multitask positioning, open-source release
OpenAI API pricing: GPT-4o Transcribe and GPT-4o Mini Transcribe pricing
OpenAI public API pricing: GPT-Realtime-Whisper streaming STT pricing
OpenAI speech-to-text docs: supported models, output formats, diarization behavior, 25MB upload limit, translation endpoint support
OpenAI realtime transcription docs: realtime model guidance and whisper-1 compatibility role

Review History

2026-04-17: New page. Pricing and features verified against OpenAI Whisper and OpenAI API pricing.
2026-05-10: Refreshed around OpenAI’s current hosted transcription lineup, corrected the source registry from AssemblyAI to OpenAI, added GPT-4o Transcribe Diarize and realtime transcription caveats, and reverified API pricing, file limits, output formats, and self-host model guidance.
2026-05-13: Reverified MIT license, six-model repository status, and API per-minute prices. Noted that whisper-1 and gpt-4o-transcribe-diarize no longer appear on the public pricing table but remain callable via the transcription endpoint.
2026-06-10: Reverified OpenAI speech-to-text docs and pricing; added GPT-Realtime-Whisper $0.017/min streaming STT and softened legacy whisper-1/diarize billing language where the current public pricing table does not expose a per-minute row.
2026-06-25: Reverified OpenAI speech-to-text docs and pricing. No material price change; kept legacy whisper-1 and diarize billing as account-confirmation caveats.

Share LinkedIn

Was this review helpful?

Embed this score on your siteFree. Links back.

HTML

<a href="https://aipedia.wiki/tools/whisper/" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><img src="https://aipedia.wiki/badges/whisper.svg" alt="Whisper on aipedia.wiki" width="260" height="72" /></a>

Markdown

[![Whisper on aipedia.wiki](https://aipedia.wiki/badges/whisper.svg)](https://aipedia.wiki/tools/whisper/)

Badge value auto-updates if the editorial score changes. Attribution via the link is required.

Cite this pageFor journalists, researchers, and bloggers

News writers

According to aipedia.wiki Editorial at aipedia.wiki (https://aipedia.wiki/tools/whisper/)

APA

aipedia.wiki Editorial. (2026). Whisper: Editorial Review. aipedia.wiki. Retrieved August 3, 2026, from https://aipedia.wiki/tools/whisper/

MLA 9

aipedia.wiki Editorial. "Whisper: Editorial Review." aipedia.wiki, 2026, https://aipedia.wiki/tools/whisper/. Accessed August 3, 2026.

Chicago

aipedia.wiki Editorial. 2026. "Whisper: Editorial Review." aipedia.wiki. https://aipedia.wiki/tools/whisper/.

BibTeX

@misc{whisper-editorial-review-2026,
  author = {{aipedia.wiki Editorial}},
  title = {Whisper: Editorial Review},
  year = {2026},
  publisher = {aipedia.wiki},
  url = {https://aipedia.wiki/tools/whisper/},
  note = {Accessed: 2026-08-02}
}

Spotted an error or want to share your experience with Whisper?

Every tool page is re-verified on a recurring cycle, and corrections land faster when readers flag them directly. If you spot a stale fact, a missing capability, or have used Whisper and want to share what worked or didn't, the editorial desk reviews every message sent through this form.

Email editorial@aipedia.wiki

Report outdated infoHelp us keep this page accurate