MERL Speech

by Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs

Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs Speech Group — CHiME + speech-enhancement leaders.

Looking at MERL Speech? Try this first.

Drop your audio. Transcript in seconds. First transcript free, then $4 = 300 min

TL;DR

Best for speech separation, enhancement, far-field meeting ASR research. Pricing: free.

Category
Open source
License
—
Stars
—
Last push
—
Pricing
free
Platforms
Web

What it is

MERL Speech (Hershey + Watanabe lineage) led CHiME challenge organizing, pioneered deep-clustering speech separation, and contributes to ESPnet.

Best for: Speech separation, enhancement, far-field meeting ASR research.
Watch out for: Industrial-lab research output; per-release licenses vary.

Install / use

Go to MERL Speech www.merl.com

Features

Speaker diarizationNo
Word-level timestampsNo
Streaming / real-timeNo
Languages supported0
HIPAA eligibleNo

MERL Speech vs Whipscribe

FeatureMERL SpeechWhipscribe
CategoryOpen sourceTranscription APIs
Pricingfree$4–$24 one-time packs (credits never expire) · $2 single unlock · 60 min free on signup
Speaker diarizationNoYes
Word timestampsNoYes
StreamingNoNo
Languages099
PlatformsWebWeb, API, MCP

Alternatives to MERL Speech

OpenAI Whisper
OpenAI

The reference open-source multilingual ASR model from OpenAI.

OSS · MIT ★ 107.0k
whisper.cpp
Georgi Gerganov

C/C++ port of Whisper — runs on anything, from a Raspberry Pi to Apple Silicon.

OSS · MIT ★ 52.8k
faster-whisper
SYSTRAN

4× faster than reference Whisper using CTranslate2 — production sweet spot.

OSS · MIT ★ 24.8k

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.