Transcription Engines

Transcription Engines

Transcription engines are the speech-to-text plugins that turn your audio into text. TypeWhisper for Linux bundles both local engines that run on your machine and cloud engines that send audio to an external provider.

Local engines

Local engines run on your own hardware and do not require an API key.

Engine	Notes
WhisperCpp	Bundled whisper.cpp engine. Has a configurable noSpeechThreshold for filtering silent segments to reduce hallucinated phrases.
SherpaOnnx	Local engine.
Qwen3Stt	Local engine.
Voxtral	Local engine.

CUDA acceleration currently applies to the bundled whisper.cpp engine; other bundled local engines stay on CPU. See GPU & CUDA for setup and requirements.

Cloud engines

Cloud engines send audio to an external provider and require an API key.

Engine	Real-time websocket streaming
OpenAi	Yes (GPT Realtime)
OpenAiCompatible	No
Groq	No
Deepgram	Yes
AssemblyAi	Yes
ElevenLabs	Yes
Speechmatics	Yes
Soniox	Yes
Reson8	Yes
SmallestAi	Yes
Xai	Yes
Gladia	Yes
CloudflareAsr	No
GoogleCloudStt	No

Real-time streaming

The engines marked above with real-time websocket streaming stream audio to the provider over a websocket so partial text can appear in the overlay as you speak, instead of re-uploading the growing buffer on a poll. The full streaming set is:

AssemblyAi, Deepgram, ElevenLabs, Gladia, OpenAi (GPT Realtime), Reson8, SmallestAi, Soniox, Speechmatics, and Xai.

Streaming is enabled per session from the dictation settings and falls back to the batch polling preview when the engine or setting does not support it. See Dictation for how this surfaces in the recording overlay.

Related pages

• Dictation — choosing and using a transcription engine while dictating.
• GPU & CUDA — CUDA acceleration for the bundled whisper.cpp engine.
• Plugins — the plugin model these engines plug into.

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Changelog

Date	Change
2026-06-17	Initial version.