Release2026-09-29
SYSTRAN released faster-whisper, a CTranslate2-based reimplementation of OpenAI’s Whisper. It runs up to four times faster for the same accuracy. It supports 8-bit quantization on CPU and GPU. It removes the need for FFmpeg by using PyAV. GPU execution requires NVIDIA cuBLAS and cuDNN. It is installable via PyPI. It supports batched transcription and word-level timestamps. It integrates Silero VAD for speech filtering. It works with Distil-Whisper models. It is open-source under an MIT license.
What changed
OpenAI's Whisper ran slower and used more memory for the same accuracy.
What it unlocks
Transcribing audio faster with lower memory usage on CPU and GPU.
- 4x faster than openai/whisper
- 13 minutes of audio benchmarked
- 8-bit quantization supported
What you need to act on it
- Python 3.9 or greater
- NVIDIA cuBLAS and cuDNN for GPU execution
Sources