[abraxas]

Oh, Azure's speech recognition API beats it handily on English language. Both in accuracy and speed.

Another is Deepgram. Even this obscure vendor seems to be able to handle the samples I tried better than Whisper: https://picovoice.ai/platform/cat/

But yeah, go with Azure as your starting point. It is good and the price is likely acceptable unless you're transcribing all of youtube.

[dontreact]

Umm I want to pay zero and run locally

[generalizations]

If you use the large_v2 version of whisper, and give it a prompt to indicate what it's transcribing, it can do extremely well. But do use the prompt feature.

[dontreact]

Yeah exactly this is why there’s hype. It’s the best model that you can use for free easily