Hi guys,
I'm looking for some software or an app that can turn an mp3 recording into text. There's a lot of text-to-speech solutions out there but I can't find anything that goes the other way, that is speech-to-text.
I have some mp3 recordings of lectures that I would like to turn into text and then PDF.
I am working on a custom data-management software and for a while now I've been working and looking into possibility of integrating and modifying existing local conversational AI's into it (or at least developing the possibility of doing so in the future). The first thing I've been struggling with is that information is somewhat hard to come by - searches often lead me back here to r/LocalLLaMA/ and a year old threads in r/MachineLearning. Is anyone keeping track of what is out there what is worth the attention? I am posting this here in hope of finding some info while also sharing what I know for anyone who finds it useful or is interested.
I've noticed that most open source projects are based on Open AI's Whisper and it's re-implemented versions like:
Faster Whisper (MIT license)
Insanely fast Whisper (Apache-2.0 license)
Distil-Whisper (MIT license)
WhisperSpeech by github.com/collabora (MIT license, Added here 03/2025)
WhisperLive (MIT license, Added here 03/2025)
WhisperFusion, which is WhisperSpeech+WhisperLive in one package. (Added here 03/2025)
Coqui AI's TTS and STT -models (MPL-2.0 license) have gained some traction, but on their site they have stated that they're shutting down.
Tortoise TTS (Apache-2.0 license) and its re-implemented versions such as:
Tortoise-TTS-fast (AGPL-3.0, Apache-2.0 licenses) and its slightly faster(?) fork (AGPL-3.0 license).
StyleTTS and it's newer version:
StyleTTS2 (MIT license)
Alibaba Group's Tongyi SpeechTeam's SenseVoice (STT) [MIT license+possibly others] and CosyVoice (TTS) [Apache-2.0 license].
(11.2.2025): I will try to maintain this list so will begin adding new ones as well.
1/2025 Kokoro TTS (MIT License)
2/2025 Zonos by Zyphra (Apache-2.0 license)
3/2025 added: Metavoice (Apache-2.0 license)
3/2025 added: F5-TTS (MIT license)
3/2025 added: Orpheus-TTS by canopylabs.ai (Apache-2.0 license)
3/2025 added: MegaTTS3 (Apache-2.0 license)
4/2025 added: Index-tts (Apache-2.0 license). [Can be tried here.]
4/2025 added: Dia TTS (Apache-2.0 license) [Can be tried here.]
5/2025 added: Spark-TTS (Apache-2.0 license)[Can be tried here.]
5/2025 added: Parakeet TDT 0.6B V2 (CC-BY-4.0 license), STT English only [Can be tried here.], update: V3 is multilingual and has an onnx -version.
8/2025 added: Verbify-TTS (MIT License) by reddit user u/MattePalte. Described as simple locally run screen-reader-style app.
8/2025 added: Chatterbox-TTS (MIT License) [Can be tried here.]
8/2025 added: Microsoft's VibeVoice TTS (MIT Licence) for generating consistent long-form dialogues. Comes in 1.5B and 7B sizes. Both models can be tried here. 0.5B model is also on the way. This one also already has a ComfyUI wrapper by u/Fabix84/ (additional info here). Quantized versions by u/teachersecret can be found here
8/2025 added: BosonAI's Higgs Audio TTS (Apache-2.0 license). Can be tried here and further tested here. This one supports complex long-form dialogues. Extra prompting is supposed to allow setting the scene and adjusting expressions. Also has a quantized (4bit fork) version.
8/2025 added: StepFun AI's (Chinese AI-team source) Step-Audio 2 Mini Speech-To-Speech (Apache-2.0 license) a 8B "speech-to-speech" (Audio-To-Tokens + Tokens-To-Audio) -model. Added because related, even if bypasses the "to-text" -part.
---------------------------------------------------------
Edit1: Added Distil-Whisper because "insanely fast whisper" is not a model, but these were shipped together.
Edit2: StyleTTS2FineTune is not actually a different version of StyleTTS2, but rather a framework to finetuning it.
Edit3(11.2.2025): as suggested by u/caidong I added Kokoro TTS + also added Zonos to the list.
Edit4(20.3.2025): as suggested by u/Trysem , added WhisperSpeech, WhisperLive, WhisperFusion, Metavoice and F5-TTS.
Edit5(22.3.2025): Added Orpheus-TTS.
Edit6(28.3.2025): Added MegaTTS3.
Edit7(11.4.2025): as suggested by u/Trysem/, added Index-tts.
Edit8(24.4.2025): Added Dia TTS (Nari-labs).
Edit9(02.5.2025): Added Spark-TTS as suggested by u/Tandulim (here)
Edit9(02.5.2025): Added Parakeet TDT 0.6B V2. More info in this thread.
Edit10(29.8.2025): As originally suggested by u/Trysem and later by u/Nitroedge added Chatterbox-TTS to the list.
Edit10(29.8.2025): u/MattePalte asked me to add his own TTS called Verbify-TTS to the list.
Edit10(29.8.2025): Added Microsoft's recently released VibeVoice TTS, BosonAI's Higgs Audio TTS and StepFun's STS. +Extra info.
Edit11+12(1.9.2025): Added VibeVoice TTS's quantized versions and Parakeet V3.
Videos
I know OpenAI recently released whisper V3 Turbo but I remember hearing about some other ones that's a lot better but I can't remember
I am building a LLMs infrastructure that misses one thing - text to speech. I know there are really good apis like MURF.AI out there, but I haven't been able to find any decent open source TTS, that is more natural than the system one.
If you know any of these, please leave a comment
Thanks
I am searching for a fully open-source Python script or an application to seamlessly transcribe audio into text in French.
I dislike websites since they usually come with restrictions and limitations in most instances (approximately 99% of the time).
Do you know where I could find something suitable?
I'd like something I can use to transcribe speech to text as part of a larger program. Google-ing open source speech to text I see CMU Sphinx and Open Mind Speech. Any other options I should be aware of? Which is the most accurate?
Tambourine is an open source, cross-platform voice dictation app that uses configurable STT and LLM pipelines to turn natural speech into clean, formatted text in any app.
I have been building this on the side for the past few weeks. The motivation was wanting something like Wispr Flow, but with full control over the models and prompts. I wanted to be able to choose which STT and LLM providers were used, tune formatting behavior, and experiment without being locked into a single black box setup.
The back end is a local Python server built on Pipecat. Pipecat provides a modular voice agent framework that makes it easy to stitch together different STT models and LLMs into a real-time pipeline. Swapping providers, adjusting prompts, or adding new processing steps does not require changing the desktop app, which makes experimentation much faster.
Speech is streamed in real time from the desktop app to the server. After transcription, the raw text is passed through an LLM that handles punctuation, filler word removal, formatting, list structuring, and personal dictionary rules. The formatting prompt is fully editable, so you can tailor the output to your own writing style or domain-specific language.
The desktop app is built with Tauri, with a TypeScript front end and Rust handling system level integration. This allows global hotkeys, audio device control, and text input directly at the cursor across platforms.
I shared an early version with friends and presented it at my local Claude Code meetup, and the feedback encouraged me to share it more widely.
This project is still under active development while I work through edge cases, but most core functionality already works well and is immediately useful for daily work. I would really appreciate feedback from people interested in voice interfaces, prompting strategies, latency tradeoffs, or model selection.
Happy to answer questions or go deeper into the pipeline.
https://github.com/kstonekuan/tambourine-voice
Hi I am looking for some speech to text converter for windows, but not able to get anything.
I know there are two popular models, vosk and whisper, but I am unable to find anything which I can use on windows for live transcription.
Any suggestions please?
Hey guys, I would like to add speech to text transcription. Hosting an open source model on cloud so I can do this anywhere would be good.
Do you guys know any highly accurate STT open source models that is highly accurate?
Also, can it run on CPU or GPU is a must?
Hi everyone, hope you’re doing well. I’m currently working on a project where I need to convert audio conversations between a customer and agents into text.
Since most recordings involve up to three speakers, could you please suggest some top open-source models suited for this task, particularly those that support speaker diarization?
I've been working on a project that needs reliable Speech to text conversion with the potential for multiple active individuals in a conversation. I've only used the long ago released OpenAI Whisper model which was pretty terrible at 3+ people and often had issues consistently attributing correct voice to tag.
It's a pretty old model (given how fast everything is) what models are you guys using and what are some of the pro/cons?
currently using elevenlabs for text to speech the voice quality is not good in hindi and also it is costly.So i thinking of moving to open source TTS.Suggest me good open source alternative for eleven labs with low latency and good hindi voice result.
Years ago I searched unsuccessfully for human-sounding TTS software (German voice output) for Linux. Nothing was found.
Is there really still (in year 2024) nothing comparable to Balabolka and Read Aloud and in Linux-world?
I am looking for open source speech to text tools, I am not familiar with the progress in this field but Ideally I would like something fast and reliable, that does english as well as other languages as french and spanish, that is also easy to use. Are there any recommendations ?
Hi all, I recently ran a benchmark comparing a bunch of speech-to-text APIs and models under real-world conditions like noise robustness, non-native accents, and technical vocab, etc.
It includes all the big players like Google, AWS, MS Azure, open source models like Whisper (small and large), speech recognition startups like AssemblyAI / Deepgram / Speechmatics, and newer LLM-based models like Gemini 2.0 Flash/Pro and GPT-4o. I've benchmarked the real time streaming versions of some of the APIs as well.
I mostly did this to decide the best API to use for an app I'm building but figured this might be helpful for other builders too. Would love to know what other cases would be useful to include too.
Link here: https://voicewriter.io/speech-recognition-leaderboard
TLDR if you don't want to click on the link: the best model right now seems to be GPT-4o-transcribe, followed by Eleven Labs, Whisper-large, and the Gemini models. All the startups and AWS/Microsoft are decent with varying performance in different situations. Google (the original, not Gemini) is extremely bad.
hello guys, it turns out that I want to develop a simple project where given the audio transcription it takes between 10 and 15 minutes to synthesize it, elevenlabs has good voices but it has many limitations with the amount of text, I tried coqui tts and the voices still sound very robotic to me as well The project is with a voice in Spanish. If anyone please recommend one that adapts to what I am publishing, thank you very much.
What's the best model to transcribe a conversation in realtime, meaning that the words have to appear as the person is talking.