# Cohere Transcribe

11 Hacker News commenters recommended Cohere Transcribe and 2 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 3 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Open-source Apache 2.0 speech-to-text model that people find accurate, fast and competitive on benchmarks. Critics say its quality varies by task and it lacks custom vocabulary support.

## Why people recommend it

- Accurate, fast and excellent (2 comments): "Accurate and fast model, very happy with it so far!" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47591297)) "Cohere Transcribe is also excellent" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48965004))
- Competitive on public benchmarks (2 comments): "performs better than it on the benchmarks that hugging face publishes on the openASR leaderboard" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47591815)) "it's competitive for sure!" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47593226))

## What people warn about

- Quality varies from task to task (1 comments): "Cohere Transcribe is interesting, but how strong it is seems to vary more from task to task." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48895258))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [OpenAI Whisper](https://hackerapproved.com/p/whisper.md): 164 recommend
- [NVIDIA Parakeet](https://hackerapproved.com/p/parakeet.md): 144 recommend
- [Mistral Voxtral](https://hackerapproved.com/p/voxtral-transcribe-2.md): 69 recommend
- [Moonshine open-weights STT models](https://hackerapproved.com/p/moonshine.md): 37 recommend
- [whisper.cpp](https://hackerapproved.com/p/whisper-cpp.md): 33 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Cohere Transcribe", https://hackerapproved.com/p/cohere-transcribe/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).