Verified project record

ggml-org/whisper.cpp

ggml-org/whisper.cpp is a plain C/C++ inference library for running OpenAI Whisper automatic speech recognition across supported platforms. It provides a dependency-free implementation with zero runtime memory allocations, voice activity detection, model quantization, and example components for real-time and HTTP-based transcription.

Project overview

Project type: Model Runtime · Audio & Speech
Use cases: Meeting Notes · Audio & Speech
Deployment: Refer to project documentation
License: MIT

Best for

C/C++ developers needing to embed speech-recognition inference directly into local applications.
Environments requiring self-hosted speech transcription without managed cloud services.

Key capabilities

Executes automatic speech-recognition inference using OpenAI Whisper models.
Provides a C-style API for integrating the high-level Whisper implementation into custom applications.
Includes support for voice activity detection alongside Whisper inference.
Supports quantized ggml Whisper models to reduce memory and disk use.
Contains a stream example that continuously transcribes microphone audio sampled every half second.
Ships a documented whisper-server example described as an HTTP transcription server with an OAI-like API.

Limitations and risks

The project provides inference capabilities only and cannot be used for model training.
The documented whisper-cli example currently runs only with 16-bit WAV files.
The first Core ML run on a device is slow because the ANE service compiles the model to a device-specific format.

Getting started

Clone the repository, download a Whisper model converted to ggml format, build the project with CMake, and run whisper-cli with an audio file.

Evidence and sources

README: There are various examples of using the library for different projects in the [examples](examples) folder.
README: High-performance inference of [OpenAI's Whisper](https://github.com/openai/whisper) automatic speech recognition (ASR) model:
README: - Plain C/C++ implementation without dependencies
README: Stable: [v1.9.1](https://github.com/ggml-org/whisper.cpp/releases/tag/v1.9.1) / [Roadmap](https://github.com/orgs/ggml-org/projects/4/)
README: - [C-style API](https://github.com/ggml-org/whisper.cpp/blob/master/include/whisper.h)

Reviewed at: 2026-07-17T07:02:16Z