Model reference · open weights

distil-large-ct2

Audio distil-whisper Speech→text 1 build Open weights 3k dl/mo

distil-large-ct2 is an open-weight audio or speech model from distil-whisper. distil-large-v3.5-ct2 (BF16) weighs 1.5 GB; the smallest configuration that runs it is RTX 3060 12 GB.

For self-hosting, compare this build's requirements below with the GPU you plan to rent.

  • distil-large-ct2 is an automatic speech recognition model created by distil-whisper and published as distil-whisper/distil-large-v3.5-ct2.
  • It is designed for English language transcription and is distributed under the MIT license.
  • The model weights are converted to CTranslate2 format to serve as the supported backend for the Faster-Whisper inference package.

Summary of the distil-whisper/distil-large-v3.5-ct2 model card, 2026-10-01

What it is

Released bydistil-whisper
Released2025-03-14
VRAM1.5 GB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for distil-large-v3.5-ct2 (BF16)

1.5 GBweights, file size
1.6 GBruntime overhead
CardOne streamMemory
RTX 3060 12 GBfits11.6 GB
RTX 4060 Ti 16 GBfits15.4 GB
RTX 3090 24 GBfits23.4 GB
RTX 4090 24 GBfits23.4 GB
RTX 5090 32 GBfits31.0 GB
L40S 48 GBfits44.0 GB
A100 80 GBfits78.2 GB
H100 80 GBfits78.1 GB
RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96 GBfits93.8 GB
DGX Spark (GB10) 128 GB unifiedfits107 GB
H200 141 GBfits138 GB
B200 180 GBfits176 GB

From the model card

What distil-whisper says about distil-large-ct2

Read the model card

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.

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}
}

Quoted from the model card on Hugging Face. The full card is behind the Hugging Face link above.

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.
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