insanely-fast-whisper
by Vaibhav Srivastav
CLI that transcribes 150 minutes of audio in ~98 seconds on an A100.
TL;DR
CLI that transcribes 150 minutes of audio in ~98 seconds on an A100.
Best for batch-processing huge backlogs on rented H100/A100 time. Pricing: free.
Category
Open source
License
Apache-2.0
Stars
★ 12.4k
Last push
2025-10-25
Pricing
free
Platforms
Linux, GPU
What it is
An opinionated CLI wrapper around Hugging Face Transformers + Flash Attention + BetterTransformer. Trades install complexity for throughput: ~150 min of audio in ~98s on an A100. The reference for "how fast can Whisper go on current hardware." Apache-2.0.
Best for: Batch-processing huge backlogs on rented H100/A100 time.
Watch out for: Requires an NVIDIA GPU with enough VRAM for Whisper-large-v3 + Flash Attention; CPU path is not practical.
Watch out for: Requires an NVIDIA GPU with enough VRAM for Whisper-large-v3 + Flash Attention; CPU path is not practical.
Install / use
pipx install insanely-fast-whisper
Features
| Speaker diarization | Yes |
| Word-level timestamps | Yes |
| Streaming / real-time | No |
| Languages supported | 99 |
| HIPAA eligible | No |
Links
insanely-fast-whisper vs Whipscribe
| Feature | insanely-fast-whisper | Whipscribe |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Open source | Transcription APIs |
| Pricing | free | free beta |
| Speaker diarization | Yes | Yes |
| Word timestamps | Yes | Yes |
| Streaming | No | No |
| Languages | 99 | 99 |
| Platforms | Linux, GPU | Web, API, MCP |
Alternatives to insanely-fast-whisper
Whipscribe is a managed faster-whisper + whisperX service. If you want transcripts without running infrastructure, paste a URL or drop a file in the form below — you'll have a transcript in seconds.