Is WhisperAI the same as OpenAI Whisper?

WhisperAI is a hosted service built on the Whisper family of speech models (currently large-v3). OpenAI Whisper is the open-source model itself, released on GitHub under an MIT license. The underlying speech recognition is closely related; the surrounding product is what WhisperAI adds.

Can I run OpenAI Whisper myself for free?

Yes. The weights and code are MIT-licensed on GitHub. You install Python, ffmpeg, and the whisper or faster-whisper package, download the model, and run it on CPU or GPU. There is no per-transcription fee.

What does open-source Whisper not include that WhisperAI does?

Open-source Whisper transcribes audio. It does not identify speakers, generate summaries, extract action items, export styled subtitles, provide a web UI, or manage uploads.

Is open-source Whisper more accurate than WhisperAI?

Both use the same underlying model family. WhisperAI runs large-v3 by default, so quality is essentially the same as a local large-v3 install.

Do I need a GPU to run OpenAI Whisper locally?

Technically no — the smaller models run on CPU. In practice the large-v3 model is slow on CPU; most self-hosters use a GPU (CUDA on NVIDIA, or Metal/MLX on Apple Silicon via faster-whisper/whisper.cpp).

What about data privacy compared to running Whisper locally?

Local inference is the only way to guarantee audio never leaves your machine — that's a real advantage for some compliance regimes. WhisperAI processes audio in the cloud with standard encryption and access controls.

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WhisperAI vs OpenAI Whisper