Model reference · open weights
faster-distil-whisper-large is an open-weight audio or speech model from Purfview. AxForge deploys and operates it for you on dedicated EU-owned hardware — with the licence handled where one is required.
Available as managed deployment — configured and operated for you on dedicated EU hardware, quoted per deployment.
What it is
| Released by | Purfview |
|---|---|
| Type | Audio & music |
| Task | Speech→text |
| Runs with | ctranslate2 |
| Released | 2025-04-06 |
| Popularity | 1k downloads / month |
| Licence | Open weights |
About
This repository contains the model weights for distil-large-v3.5 converted to CTranslate2 format. CTranslate2 is a fast inference engine for Transformer models and is the supported backend for the Faster-Whisper package.
To use the model in Faster-Whisper, first install the PyPi package according to the official instructions.
For this example, we'll also install 🤗 Datasets to load a toy audio dataset from the Hugging Face Hub:
pip install --upgrade pip
pip install --upgrade git+https://github.com/SYSTRAN/faster-whisper datasets[audio]
The following code snippet loads the distil-large-v3 model and runs inference on an example file from the LibriSpeech ASR dataset:
import torch
from faster_whisper import WhisperModel
from datasets import load_dataset
# define our torch configuration
device = "cuda" if torch.cuda.is_available() else "cpu"
compute_type = "float16" if torch.cuda.is_available() else "float32"
# load model on GPU if available, else cpu
model = WhisperModel("distil-whisper/distil-large-v3.5-ct2", device=device, compute_type=compute_type)
# load toy dataset for example
dataset = load_dataset("hf-internal-testing/librispeech_asr_dummy", "clean", split="validation")
sample = dataset[1]["audio"]["path"]
segments, info = model.transcribe(sample, beam_size=5, language="en")
for segment in segments:
print("[%.2fs -> %.2fs] %s" % (segment.start, segment.end, segment.text))
To transcribe a local audio file, simply pass the path to the audio file as the audio argument to transcribe:
segments, info = model.transcribe("audio.mp3", beam_size=5, language="en")
For more information about the Distil-Large-v3.5 model, refer to the original model card.
Distil-Whisper inherits the MIT license from OpenAI's Whisper model.
If you use this model, please consider citing the Distil-Whisper paper:
@misc{gandhi2023distilwhisper,
title={Distil-Whisper: Robust Knowledge Distillation via Large-Scale Pseudo Labelling},
author={Sanchit Gandhi and Patrick von Platen and Alexander M. Rush},
year={2023},
eprint={2311.00430},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.CL}
}
From the published model card. Full card on the HuggingFace links in the sidebar.
How it works
Using it via the API
Once AxForge deploys purfview-faster-distil-whisper-large for you, it answers on the OpenAI-compatible API — the same base URL and keys as every other model. (purfview-faster-distil-whisper-large below is illustrative; you get the exact model name on deployment.)
$ curl -sS https://api.axforge.ai/v1/audio/transcriptions \ -H "Authorization: Bearer $AXFORGE_API_KEY" \ -F model="purfview-faster-distil-whisper-large" -F file=@audio.mp3
Create an account — your API key is available in the console. 3M free tokens every 30 days with every new account.