Whisper large-v3
Hugging Face (OpenAI) Open weights
The catch: It listens in 30-second windows, so longer audio has to be chunked or transcribed sequentially.
| Access | Open weights |
|---|---|
| Free limits | Free to download and self-host; you pay only for your own compute. 1550M-parameter speech recognition and translation model. Faster option: openai/whisper-large-v3-turbo (809M, MIT; 4 decoder layers instead of 32; not trained for translation). |
| Modality | audio |
| Credit card | Not required |
| Commercial use | Allowed |
| Trains on your data | – |
| Licence or terms | MIT |
| Context window | – |
| Model id | openai/whisper-large-v3 |
| Base URL | – |
| Last checked | 2 Oct 2026 |
How to use Whisper large-v3
Download the weights and serve them yourself; the quickstart below shows one way. Licence: MIT.
Quickstart
pip install -U openai-whisper && whisper audio.mp3 --model large-v3
Paste into Claude Code
I want to run the open-weight model "Whisper large-v3" (openai/whisper-large-v3) for my project. Please: 1. Check the model card and tell me the hardware it needs and the simplest way to serve it (vLLM, SGLang, Ollama or a hosted endpoint). 2. Give me a minimal working setup and a test request. 3. Tell me the licence terms for commercial use. 4. If a cheaper or smaller variant would do the job, mention it.
Before you ship on it
- It listens in 30-second windows, so longer audio has to be chunked or transcribed sequentially.
- The openai/whisper GitHub README says the code and model weights are released under the MIT License; the Hugging Face card for large-v3 is tagged Apache-2.0. Both allow commercial use.
- Free to run means you pay for the GPUs, the serving stack and the on-call.
Questions
Is Whisper large-v3 free?
Yes. Open weights offers it as open weights, with these limits: Self-host free · MIT. No credit card is needed.
Can I use Whisper large-v3 commercially?
Yes, under MIT. Check the current terms before you ship.
How do I start with Whisper large-v3?
Download the weights and serve them yourself; the quickstart below shows one way. Licence: MIT.
Source: huggingface.co/openai/whisper-large-v3, checked 2 Oct 2026.