WhisperX
Hacker ApprovedShares rank 13 of 25 speech recognition models by recommenders
Open-source CLI for fast transcription and speaker diarization that people run locally; setup is fiddly and speaker labels can be inconsistent.
Open-source CLI for fast transcription and speaker diarization that people run locally; setup is fiddly and speaker labels can be inconsistent.
12 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 10
- criticize it
- 2
- approval share
- 83%
Recommended in 7 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 10 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 5 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 7 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
Fast, accurate transcription
“all of the state-of-the-art speech-to-text systems are large-language model based and are significantly faster and better than what we had before”
Comment from 26 Dec 2025 in “Rob Pike Goes Nuclear over GenAI” “with whisperx I can get a transcript in 5 minutes with just a single command”
Comment from 31 Mar 2026 in “Cohere Transcribe: Speech Recognition” “plain WhisperX is more accurate”
Comment from 31 Mar 2026 in “Cohere Transcribe: Speech Recognition” Speaker diarization built in
“If you need diarization, you can use something like https://github.com/m-bain/whisperX”
Comment from 18 Nov 2025 in “Trying out Gemini 3 Pro with audio transcription and a new pelican benchmark” “it's the most complete CLI so far and has features like diarization”
Comment from 9 Jan 2026 in “Dell's CES 2026 chat was the most pleasingly un-AI briefing I've had in 5 years”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Setup is a pain
“getting WhisperX to run locally is a pain and needs a bunch of specifics”
Comment from 31 Aug 2026 in “Soundwise.ai: Free AI Transcription That Respects Your Privacy” Inconsistent speaker labels
“it is not perfect, sometime for the same speaker you will get multiple labels”
Comment from 18 Nov 2025 in “Ask HN: What do you use for speaker diarization?” Lyric sync accuracy falls short
“my minimum quality bar for the lyrics and sync accuracy in karaoke is much higher than what's achievable with WhisperX / Force Alignment”
Comment from 19 Mar 2026 in “Nightingale – open-source karaoke app that works with any song on your computer” “back at that time, it performed poorly”
Comment from 18 Mar 2026 in “Nightingale – open-source karaoke app that works with any song on your computer”
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 |
| WhisperXThis page | 10 | 2 | 83% | 7 | — | Approved |
What people said
11 of the 12 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“getting WhisperX to run locally is a pain and needs a bunch of specifics”
“whisperx already solves this”
“with whisperx I can get a transcript in 5 minutes with just a single command”
“plain WhisperX is more accurate”
“my minimum quality bar for the lyrics and sync accuracy in karaoke is much higher than what's achievable with WhisperX / Force Alignment”
“back at that time, it performed poorly”
“it's the most complete CLI so far and has features like diarization”
“all of the state-of-the-art speech-to-text systems are large-language model based and are significantly faster and better than what we had before”
“it worked hassle-free after setup”
“If you need diarization, you can use something like https://github.com/m-bain/whisperX”
“it is not perfect, sometime for the same speaker you will get multiple labels”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.