faster-whisper
Hacker ApprovedShares rank 11 of 25 speech recognition models by recommenders
Recommended as a fast, free way to run Whisper speech-to-text locally, even on CPU. Main caveat: its output needs getting used to.
Recommended as a fast, free way to run Whisper speech-to-text locally, even on CPU. Main caveat: its output needs getting used to.
12 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 11
- criticize it
- 1
- approval share
- 92%
Recommended in 8 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 11 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 11 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 8 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Faster than OpenAI's implementation
“Whisper.cpp/Faster-whisper are a good bit faster than OpenAI's implementation”
Comment from 7 Nov 2025 in “You should write an agent” “faster-whisper can be faster in many cases, even on CPU.”
Comment from 9 Jan 2026 in “Dell's CES 2026 chat was the most pleasingly un-AI briefing I've had in 5 years” Speed on CPU and GPU
“Whisper.cpp/Faster-whisper are a good bit faster than OpenAI's implementation”
Comment from 7 Nov 2025 in “You should write an agent” “faster-whisper can be faster in many cases, even on CPU.”
Comment from 9 Jan 2026 in “Dell's CES 2026 chat was the most pleasingly un-AI briefing I've had in 5 years” “I'm really happy with faster-whisper on a GPU”
Comment from 19 Jul 2026 in “Transcribe.cpp” Used by other speech apps
“Thanks to faster-whisper and local models using quantization, I use it in all places where I was previously using Superwhisper”
Comment from 17 Feb 2026 in “Show HN: Free Alternative to Wispr Flow, Superwhisper, and Monologue” “I use SpeechNote with FasterWhisper”
Comment from 14 Mar 2026 in “Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Needs getting used to its quirks
“you need to get used to the context it's used it and the weirdness it translates into”
Comment from 13 Jul 2026 in “Apple's new SpeechAnalyzer API, benchmarked against Whisper and its predecessor”
Other speech recognition models people recommend
The four most recommended other speech recognition models, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| OpenAI Whisper | 164 | 53 | 76% | 12 | — | Approved |
| NVIDIA Parakeet | 144 | 27 | 84% | 12 | — | Approved |
| Mistral Voxtral | 69 | 27 | 72% | 8 | — | Approved |
| Moonshine open-weights STT models | 37 | 13 | 74% | 7 | — | Approved |
| faster-whisperThis page | 11 | 1 | 92% | 8 | — | Approved |
What people said
9 of the 12 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“faster-whisper produces the text then onnx scores all my HA entities”
“Things could be better, but they just weren't designed to be.”
“I'm really happy with faster-whisper on a GPU”
“you need to get used to the context it's used it and the weirdness it translates into”
“The extra features smooth out the subtitle editing process very substantially.”
“I use SpeechNote with FasterWhisper”
“Thanks to faster-whisper and local models using quantization, I use it in all places where I was previously using Superwhisper”
“faster-whisper can be faster in many cases, even on CPU.”
“Whisper.cpp/Faster-whisper are a good bit faster than OpenAI's implementation”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.