Whisper OpenAI: Open Source AI Audio Transcription in 2026

Whisper is OpenAI's speech recognition model, released open source in 2022. Unlike [Otter.ai](/en/blog/otter-ia-transcription-reunions) which is a cloud service, Whisper can be deployed locally — making it the go-to option for organizations with maximum privacy requirements.

## Whisper Model Sizes

- **tiny, base, small**: fast, lightweight, ideal on CPU
- **medium**: good quality/speed trade-off
- **large (v2, v3)**: best quality, requires GPU

The latest models (large-v3) achieve quality that rivals cloud services on major languages.

## Whisper Local vs Cloud Service

**Choose local Whisper if**:
- Your recordings contain sensitive data (board meetings, medical consultations, legal matters)
- Your sector requires data not leaving your infrastructure
- You transcribe high volumes at controlled cost
- You're building an application with integrated transcription

**Choose Otter.ai or a cloud service if**:
- You want a turnkey interface without installation
- You need real-time collaboration (sharing, annotation)
- You lack technical resources to manage infrastructure

For GDPR constraints of European businesses, see our [compliance checklist](/en/blog/rgpd-outils-ia-checklist-conformite).

## Supported Languages

Whisper large-v3 supports more than 90 languages, with excellent quality on English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Arabic, Japanese, and Chinese.

## OpenAI Whisper API

OpenAI also offers Whisper as a cloud service via API (`/v1/audio/transcriptions`). A practical intermediate — simpler than local deployment, cheaper than some turnkey services, but with standard cloud constraints.

## Alternatives

- **Deepgram**: cloud service optimized for real-time, robust API
- **AssemblyAI**: cloud, with entity extraction and summarization
- **Faster-Whisper**: optimized Whisper version, 4x faster
- **WhisperX**: version with integrated speaker diarization

For voice synthesis (the opposite of transcription), see our [ElevenLabs guide](/en/blog/elevenlabs-voix-ia-synthetique). For all transcription tools, see our [Productivity category](/en/categories/productivity).