Is Whisper transcription free?

The Whisper model itself is open source under the MIT license, so if you run it on your own machine the software is free — you only pay for the hardware and electricity. Hosted Whisper transcription is a different question. The OpenAI Whisper API is metered per minute. Hosted tools like WhisperAI usually offer a small free tier and then paid plans. So 'free' depends entirely on whether you're willing to set Whisper up yourself.

How accurate is Whisper transcription, really?

On clean audio with a single speaker in a common language, Whisper transcription is genuinely strong — often close to a careful human first pass. Accuracy drops with overlapping speakers, heavy background noise, strong accents, and long technical jargon it has not seen. Treat it as an excellent first draft, not as a certified transcript.

Can Whisper transcription identify different speakers?

The vanilla Whisper model does not do speaker diarization. To get 'Speaker 1 / Speaker 2' style labels you need to pair Whisper with a separate diarization step (for example pyannote.audio if you're rolling your own) or use a hosted tool that adds diarization on top. WhisperAI does this for you out of the box.

What languages does Whisper transcription support?

OpenAI trained Whisper on roughly 99 languages. English is by far the strongest, with Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Japanese, and Mandarin also performing well. Lower-resource languages still work but with lower accuracy. Whisper can also detect the language automatically.

What's the difference between Whisper and the Whisper API?

Whisper is the open-source speech recognition model OpenAI released in 2022. The Whisper API is OpenAI's hosted endpoint that runs that model for you and bills per minute of audio. Same underlying technology, different way to access it.

Can I transcribe long files with Whisper?

Yes, but with caveats. The OpenAI API has a 25 MB upload limit, so long recordings need to be chunked first. Local Whisper has no file-size cap but a two-hour podcast on a CPU will take a long time. Most hosted tools, including WhisperAI, handle the chunking and stitching for you.

Is Whisper transcription good enough for legal or medical use?

It's useful for drafting and search, but not for certified records. Legal transcripts and clinical documentation typically require a human in the loop for verification. Use Whisper transcription to get a fast first pass, then have a qualified reviewer correct it.

Whisper Transcription, explained without the marketing fog.