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OpenAI Whisper-1

Available

openai/whisper-1 · by OpenAI · encoder-decoder-transformer

Pricing — 1 offering(s)

OpenAI (Audio)

Audio minutes

$0.0060 / minute Current 2023-03-01 → present

Showing the active price and any recorded history. Full pricing history is available via the paid API — see API docs.

Capability profile

transcription accuracy moderate

language support strong

speaker diarisation weak

real time streaming weak

custom vocabulary weak

Benchmarks

Benchmark	Score	Config	Source
WER (LibriSpeech clean)	2.7 %	Whisper large-v2 paper result. API-hosted Whisper-1 uses this model checkpoint.	source ↗
WER (LibriSpeech other)	5.2 %	Whisper large-v2 on the noisier LibriSpeech Other split.	source ↗

Operator guidance

Choose Whisper-1 when broad language coverage (99 languages) or direct audio-to-English translation matters. At $0.006/min it is cost-effective for batch workloads, but Nova-3 and Universal-2 both offer better accuracy on difficult audio. Not suitable for real-time streaming; for that use Deepgram.

Use cases

Batch transcription of multilingual audio across 99 languages
Transcription and translation in a single call (audio → English text)
Research and experimentation where OpenAI platform consolidation matters
Clean audio transcription where noise robustness is not a requirement

Limitations

No streaming endpoint — batch only, file upload up to 25MB
Degrades on noisy, accented, or overlapping audio
No native speaker diarization
No custom vocabulary support