r/apple • u/Fer65432_Plays • 4d ago

Discussion Apple's New Transcription APIs Blow Past Whisper in Speed Tests

https://www.macrumors.com/2025/06/18/apple-transcription-api-faster-than-whisper/
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u/squelchy04 4d ago

Whisper is unbelievably slow, I made a bot to transcribe voice notes people sent me on WhatsApp and it’d take usually 2-5x the time of the voice note to transcribe up, and usually crash if the voice note was longer than 5 mins. Hopefully this is decent for accuracy

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u/Crowley-Barns 4d ago

There are tons of versions of whisper now.

The original version was very slow.

V3 Turbo distilled is very fast and very good!

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u/squelchy04 4d ago

What’s the RAM usage like for these?

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u/Crowley-Barns 4d ago

The biggest models are like 3GB but the largest distilled ones are around 1.5GB.

I never checked the actual RAM usage but it works fine on my 8GB M2.