Whisper Tiny
Smallest member of the Whisper encoder-decoder ASR family (39M params). Trained on 680k hours of weakly supervised multilingual audio. Targets sub-realtime transcription on CPU and tiny edge devices; ships in transformers, whisper.cpp, faster-whisper and ONNX/CoreML/TensorRT variants.
The default 'good enough' baseline when latency and footprint matter more than WER. If accuracy matters, jump to distil-large-v3 or Parakeet.
Overview
Smallest member of the Whisper encoder-decoder ASR family (39M params). Trained on 680k hours of weakly supervised multilingual audio. Targets sub-realtime transcription on CPU and tiny edge devices; ships in transformers, whisper.cpp, faster-whisper and ONNX/CoreML/TensorRT variants.
Strengths
- Runs realtime on Raspberry Pi 4 / mobile CPUs via whisper.cpp
- 99-language coverage out of the box
- Apache-2.0 weights, no commercial restrictions
- Mature ecosystem (faster-whisper, WhisperX, ONNX exports)
Weaknesses
- WER ~15-20% on LibriSpeech test-other vs ~3% for large-v3
- Hallucinates words on silence and music
- 30-second context window forces chunking with overlap for long audio
- Weak on heavy accents, code-switching, and overlapping speakers
Quantization variants
Each quantization trades model quality for file size and VRAM. Q4_K_M is the most popular starting point.
| Quantization | File size | VRAM required |
|---|---|---|
| Q4_K_M | 0.0 GB | 1 GB |
Get the model
HuggingFace
Original weights
Source repository — direct quantization required.
Hardware that runs this
Cards with enough VRAM for at least one quantization of Whisper Tiny.
Models worth comparing
Same parameter band, plus what's one tier above and below — so you can decide what actually fits your hardware.
Frequently asked
What's the minimum VRAM to run Whisper Tiny?
Can I use Whisper Tiny commercially?
What's the context length of Whisper Tiny?
Source: huggingface.co/openai/whisper-tiny
Reviewed by RunLocalAI Editorial. See our editorial policy for how we research and verify model claims.
Related — keep moving
Verify Whisper Tiny runs on your specific hardware before committing money.