Model reference · open weights
whisper-small.en is an open-weight audio or speech model from OpenAI. whisper-small.en (FP32) weighs 483 MB; the smallest configuration that runs it is RTX 3060 12 GB.
Summary of the openai/whisper-small.en model card, 2026-10-01
What it is
| Released by | OpenAI |
|---|---|
| Released | 2022-09-26 |
| Parameters | 242M |
| VRAM | 483 MB for the weights |
What it runs on
| Card | One stream | Memory |
|---|---|---|
| RTX 3060 12 GB | fits | 11.6 GB |
| RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB | fits | 15.4 GB |
| RTX 3090 24 GB | fits | 23.4 GB |
| RTX 4090 24 GB | fits | 23.4 GB |
| RTX 5090 32 GB | fits | 31.0 GB |
| L40S 48 GB | fits | 44.0 GB |
| A100 80 GB | fits | 78.2 GB |
| H100 80 GB | fits | 78.1 GB |
| RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96 GB | fits | 93.8 GB |
| DGX Spark (GB10) 128 GB unified | fits | 107 GB |
| H200 141 GB | fits | 138 GB |
| B200 180 GB | fits | 176 GB |
From the model card
Whisper is a pre-trained model for automatic speech recognition (ASR) and speech translation. Trained on 680k hours of labelled data, Whisper models demonstrate a strong ability to generalise to many datasets and domains without the need for fine-tuning.
Whisper was proposed in the paper Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision by Alec Radford et al. from OpenAI. The original code repository can be found here.
Disclaimer: Content for this model card has partly been written by the Hugging Face team, and parts of it were copied and pasted from the original model card.
Whisper is a Transformer based encoder-decoder model, also referred to as a sequence-to-sequence model. It was trained on 680k hours of labelled speech data annotated using large-scale weak supervision.
The models were trained on either English-only data or multilingual data. The English-only models were trained on the task of speech recognition. The multilingual models were trained on both speech recognition and speech translation. For speech recognition, the model predicts transcriptions in the same language as the audio. For speech translation, the model predicts transcriptions to a different language to the audio.
Whisper checkpoints come in five configurations of varying model sizes. The smallest four are trained on either English-only or multilingual data. The largest checkpoints are multilingual only. All ten of the pre-trained checkpoints are available on the Hugging Face Hub. The checkpoints are summarised in the following table with links to the models on the Hub:
| Size | Parameters | English-only | Multilingual |
|---|---|---|---|
| tiny | 39 M | ✓ | ✓ |
| base | 74 M | ✓ | ✓ |
| small | 244 M | ✓ | ✓ |
| medium | 769 M | ✓ | ✓ |
| large | 1550 M | x | ✓ |
| large-v2 | 1550 M | x | ✓ |
This checkpoint is an English-only model, meaning it can be used for English speech recognition. Multilingual speech recognition or speech translation is possible through use of a multilingual checkpoint.
To transcribe audio samples, the model has to be used alongside a WhisperProcessor.
The WhisperProcessor is used to:
>>> from transformers import WhisperProcessor, WhisperForConditionalGeneration
>>> from datasets import load_dataset
>>> # load model and processor
>>> processor = WhisperProcessor.from_pretrained("openai/whisper-small.en")
>>> model = WhisperForConditionalGeneration.from_pretrained("openai/whisper-small.en")
>>> # load dummy dataset and read audio files
>>> ds = load_dataset("hf-internal-testing/librispeech_asr_dummy", "clean", split="validation")
>>> sample = ds[0]["audio"]
>>> input_features = processor(sample["array"], sampling_rate=sample["sampling_rate"], return_tensors="pt").input_features
>>> # generate token ids
>>> predicted_ids = model.generate(input_features)
>>> # decode token ids to text
>>> transcription = processor.batch_decode(predicted_ids, skip_special_tokens=False)
[' Mr. Quilter is the apostle of the middle classes, and we are glad to welcome his gospel.']
>>> transcription = processor.batch_decode(predicted_ids, skip_special_tokens=True)
[' Mr. Quilter is the apostle of the middle classes and we are glad to welcome his gospel.']
The context tokens can be removed from the start of the transcription by setting skip_special_tokens=True.
This code snippet shows how to evaluate Whisper small.en on LibriSpeech test-clean:
>>> from datasets import load_dataset
>>> from transformers import WhisperForConditionalGeneration, WhisperProcessor
>>> import torch
>>> from evaluate import load
>>> librispeech_test_clean = load_dataset("librispeech_asr", "clean", split="test")
>>> processor = WhisperProcessor.from_pretrained("openai/whisper-small.en")
>>> model = WhisperForConditionalGeneration.from_pretrained("openai/whisper-small.en").to("cuda")
>>> def map_to_pred(batch):
>>> audio = batch["audio"]
>>> input_features = processor(audio["array"], sampling_rate=audio["sampling_rate"], return_tensors="pt").input_features
>>> batch["reference"] = processor.tokenizer._normalize(batch['text'])
>>>
>>> with torch.no_grad():
>>> predicted_ids = model.generate(input_features.to("cuda"))[0]
>>> transcription = processor.decode(predicted_ids)
>>> batch["prediction"] = processor.tokenizer._normalize(transcription)
>>> return batch
>>> result = librispeech_test_clean.map(map_to_pred)
>>> wer = load("wer")
>>> print(100 * wer.compute(references=result["reference"], predictions=result["prediction"]))
3.053161596922323
The Whisper model is intrinsically desig
Quoted from the model card on Hugging Face. The full card is behind the Hugging Face link above.