Model reference · open weights
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.
Summary of the kotoba-tech/kotoba-whisper-v2.0-faster model card, 2026-10-01
What it is
| Released by | kotoba-tech |
|---|---|
| Released | 2024-09-17 |
| VRAM | 1.5 GB 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
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.
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))
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:
| audio file | audio duration (min) | whisper.cpp (sec) | faster-whisper (sec) | hf pipeline (sec) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| audio 1 | 50.3 | 581 | 2601 | 807 |
| audio 2 | 5.6 | 41 | 73 | 61 |
| audio 3 | 4.9 | 30 | 141 | 54 |
| audio 4 | 5.6 | 35 | 126 | 69 |
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.
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.
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