Model reference · open weights

faster-distil-whisper-large

Available as managed deployment Audio Purfview · community Speech→text 1 variants 1k dl/mo

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 byPurfview
TypeAudio & music
TaskSpeech→text
Runs withctranslate2
Released2025-04-06
Popularity1k downloads / month
LicenceOpen weights

About

What faster-distil-whisper-large is

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.

Read the full model card

Usage

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")

Model Details

For more information about the Distil-Large-v3.5 model, refer to the original model card.

License

Distil-Whisper inherits the MIT license from OpenAI's Whisper model.

Citation

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

How audio & music work

Audio or textinputAudio modelrecognise / synthesiseText or audiooutputSpeech-to-text turns audio into text; text-to-speech and music models turn text into audio.

Using it via the API

Call it like any OpenAI endpoint

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.

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