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Insanely Fast Whisper, an MIT-licensed open-source project (8.8K stars, 633 forks…

2026-03-25 · 07:11 UTC ·heynavtoor ·1 min read

Brief

Insanely Fast Whisper, an MIT-licensed open-source project (8.8K stars, 633 forks as of 2026-03-25), claims massive speedups—transcribing 150 minutes of audio in 78–98 seconds using Flash Attention 2—while running locally on NVIDIA GPUs and Apple Silicon. It offers diarization, translation, JSON timestamps, and is pitched as a free alternative to per-minute cloud transcription fees.

Source evidence

title: @heynavtoor: 🚨 OpenAI charges $0.006/minute. Google charges $0.024. AWS charges $0.024. Some...
author: heynavtoor
contenttype: twitterpost
published: 2026-03-25T07:11:35+00:00
source_url: https://x.com/heynavtoor/status/2036702519959962060

word_count: 222

Tweet by @heynavtoor

🚨 OpenAI charges $0.006/minute. Google charges $0.024. AWS charges $0.024. Someone just open sourced a tool that does it for $0. And it's faster than all of them. It's called Insanely Fast Whisper. And that's not hype. That's the benchmark. 150 minutes of audio. 98 seconds to transcribe. On your own machine. No API key. No cloud. No per-minute billing. Here's what the numbers look like: → Whisper Large v3 + Flash Attention 2: 150 min of audio in 98 seconds → Distil Whisper + Flash Attention 2: 150 min in 78 seconds → Standard Whisper without optimization: 31 minutes for the same job → That's a 19x speedup. Same model. Same accuracy. Just faster. Here's what it does: → One command to transcribe any audio file or URL → Speaker diarization — knows WHO said WHAT → Transcription AND translation to other languages → Runs on NVIDIA GPUs and Mac (Apple Silicon) → Flash Attention 2 for maximum speed → Clean JSON output with timestamps → Works with every Whisper model variant Here's the wildest part: http://Otter.ai charges $100/year. Rev charges $1.50/minute. Descript charges $24/month. Enterprise transcription contracts cost thousands. Podcasters, journalists, researchers, lawyers, content creators — anyone still paying for transcription is lighting money on fire. 8.8K GitHub stars. 633 forks. MIT License. 100% Open Source. (Link in the comments)

Posted: 2026-03-25T07:11:35.000Z
Engagement: 5721 likes, 541 retweets, 154 replies