Model reference · open weights

kotoba-whisper-faster

Audio kotoba-tech Speech→text 1 build Open weights 3k dl/mo

kotoba-whisper-faster is an open-weight audio or speech model from kotoba-tech. kotoba-whisper-v2.0-faster (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.

  • kotoba-whisper-faster is an automatic speech recognition model for Japanese developed by kotoba-tech.
  • It is a conversion of the kotoba-whisper-v2.0 model to the CTranslate2 format, allowing it to be used with faster-whisper.
  • The model weights are saved in FP16 and are available under the MIT license.

Summary of the kotoba-tech/kotoba-whisper-v2.0-faster model card, 2026-10-01

What it is

Released bykotoba-tech
Released2024-09-17
VRAM1.5 GB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for kotoba-whisper-v2.0-faster (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 kotoba-tech says about kotoba-whisper-faster

Read the model card

This repository contains the conversion of kotoba-tech/kotoba-whisper-v2.0 to the CTranslate2 model format.

This model can be used in CTranslate2 or projects based on CTranslate2 such as faster-whisper.

Example

Install library and download sample audio.

pip install faster-whisper
wget https://huggingface.co/kotoba-tech/kotoba-whisper-v1.0-ggml/resolve/main/sample_ja_speech.wav

Inference with the kotoba-whisper-v2.0-faster.

from faster_whisper import WhisperModel

model = WhisperModel("kotoba-tech/kotoba-whisper-v2.0-faster")

segments, info = model.transcribe("sample_ja_speech.wav", language="ja", chunk_length=15, condition_on_previous_text=False)
for segment in segments:
    print("[%.2fs -> %.2fs] %s" % (segment.start, segment.end, segment.text))

Benchmark

We measure the inference speed of different kotoba-whisper-v2.0 implementations with four different Japanese speech audio on MacBook Pro with the following spec:

  • Apple M2 Pro
  • 32GB
  • 14-inch, 2023
  • OS Sonoma Version 14.4.1 (23E224)
audio fileaudio duration (min)whisper.cpp (sec)faster-whisper (sec)hf pipeline (sec)
audio 150.35812601807
audio 25.6417361
audio 34.93014154
audio 45.63512669

Scripts to re-run the experiment can be found bellow:

Also, currently whisper.cpp and faster-whisper support the sequential long-form decoding, and only Huggingface pipeline supports the chunked long-form decoding, which we empirically found better than the sequnential long-form decoding.

Conversion details

The original model was converted with the following command:

ct2-transformers-converter --model kotoba-tech/kotoba-whisper-v2.0 --output_dir kotoba-whisper-v2.0-faster \
    --copy_files tokenizer.json preprocessor_config.json --quantization float16

Note that the model weights are saved in FP16. This type can be changed when the model is loaded using the compute_type option in CTranslate2.

More information

For more information about the kotoba-whisper-v2.0, refer to the original model card.

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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