whatmodel.sh / stt / Distil-Whisper distil-large-v2

Distil-Whisper distil-large-v2 is an open-weights speech-to-text model from Hugging Face (Distil-Whisper), released October 2023. Its published size is 0.76B parameters. Licence: mit.

Catalogue identity notes

Exact checkpoint distil-whisper/distil-large-v2; distinct from catalogue distil-large-v3-5. Params: HF safetensors total. released: HF repo creation month.

47.9±2.2#109 of 162 speech-to-text modelsfrom 8 benchmark results across 3 sources

Score within the Open ASR English short-form WER (March 2026) comparison set only.

$ how it compares

The speech-to-text models ranked either side of Distil-Whisper distil-large-v2, out of 176 with a score, then more from Hugging Face (Distil-Whisper).

#modelscorewhereRAMreleased
120Ultravox v0.6 (Llama 3.1 8B) Fixie.ai (Ultravox)49±5comparison only2025-06
121Whisper medium.en OpenAI48±3local~2.4GB2022-09
122Distil-Whisper distil-large-v2 Hugging Face (Distil-Whisper)48±2local~2.3GB2023-10
123Distil-Whisper distil-small.en Hugging Face (Distil-Whisper)48±4local~0.9GB2023-12
124CrisperWhisper Nyra Health47±3local~4.4GB2024-08
more from Hugging Face (Distil-Whisper)
60Distil-Whisper distil-large-v3.5 Hugging Face (Distil-Whisper)58±1local~2.3GB2025-03
77Distil-Whisper distil-large-v3 Hugging Face (Distil-Whisper)56±2local~2.3GB2024-03
138Distil-Whisper distil-medium.en Hugging Face (Distil-Whisper)44±3local~1.4GB2023-10

see all speech-to-text models · find the ones that fit your machine

$ what it's good at

long-form transcription▁▁▄▁·▁▂█▄▁▁▁ #22 of 27 * · 16% of its score · 1 test

Trails STT En Conformer-Transducer Small here, though they rank lower overall.

testresultvs the others in its rundifficultycountswhy
Open ASR English long-form WER14.7% ✎▁▁▅▁·▃▅█▆▁▂▂ beats 5/30avg 12%▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ 16%typical
other tests7 not in a task · 82% of its score
testresultvs the others in its rundifficultycountswhy
Open ASR English short-form WER (March 2026)7.9% ✎▁▁▁▃··▁▁▂██▆ beats 38/86avg 8.2%▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ 16%blunt
Meanwhile long-form WER lab16.8% ✎█·······██·█ beats 0/3avg 11%▇▇▇▇▇▇ 14%sharp
TED-LIUM long-form WER lab9.7% ✎█······█·█·█ beats 0/3avg 6.9%▇▇▇▇▇ 13%sharp
Rev16 long-form WER lab21.1% ✎█········███ beats 0/3avg 20%▇▇▇▇ 11%typical
Earnings-21 long-form WER lab15.1% ✎█········███ beats 0/3avg 15%▇▇▇▇ 10%typical
Earnings-22 long-form WER lab19.1% ✎█······█·█·█ beats 0/3avg 20%▇▇▇▇ 10%typical
Distil-Whisper · 4-set out-of-distribution short-form mean WER lab10.1% ✎█·█··█·█···█ beats 2/4avg 10%▇▇▇ 7.5%typical

$ where to run it

Other ways to run it

  1. Run it as published · needs ~2.32 GB · from huggingface.co/distil-whisper (official)
    uv run --with transformers --with torch python -c "from transformers import pipeline; print(pipeline('automatic-speech-recognition', model='distil-whisper/distil-large-v2')('audio.wav', return_timestamps=True)['text'])"

Official weights and documentation: huggingface.co/distil-whisper ↗

$ how the score was worked out · distil-whisper/distil-large-v… 58%, Open ASR Leaderboard 33%, huggingface/distil-whisper RE… 8%

Each result implies a score on its own, after adjusting for how hard its test is and who ran it. The score is their weighted average, with a small pull toward the middle for thinly tested models. Each test's weight is its counts column above; here it's added up by who ran the tests. How it works

sourceresultsshare of the scorelicence
distil-whisper/distil-large-v3.5 model card · lab-reported5▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ 58%MIT
Open ASR Leaderboard2▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇▇ 33%Apache-2.0
huggingface/distil-whisper README (Distil-Whisper headline WER table) · lab-reported1▇▇ 8%MIT
prior · pull toward the middle▇ 2%
weighted average= 47.9

$ improve this page

Use a short GitHub form or edit the data through a pull request. Every number needs a source; here's which ones we can use.

data updated · sources and licences · json