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 run on your own hardware and do not require an API key.
| Engine | Notes |
|---|---|
WhisperCpp |
Bundled whisper.cpp engine. Catalog includes the Large V3 models — large-v3 (f16, ~3.1 GB) and large-v3-q5_0 (~1.1 GB) — alongside the large-v3-turbo variants; the full models run the 32-layer decoder (more accurate, heavier) versus turbo's distilled 4-layer decoder, a good fit when you have GPU headroom. Has a configurable noSpeechThreshold for filtering silent segments to reduce hallucinated phrases. CUDA-capable. |
SherpaOnnx |
Local engine. Offers the Parakeet TDT 0.6B and Canary 180M Flash models, and is CUDA-capable. |
Qwen3Stt |
Local engine. |
Voxtral |
Local engine. |
CUDA acceleration applies to the bundled whisper.cpp and sherpa-onnx engines; other bundled local engines stay on CPU. See GPU & CUDA for setup and requirements.
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 |
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.
- Dictation — choosing and using a transcription engine while dictating.
- GPU & CUDA — CUDA acceleration for the bundled whisper.cpp and sherpa-onnx engines.
- Plugins — the plugin model these engines plug into.
| Date | Change |
|---|---|
| 2026-06-17 | Initial version. |
| 2026-06-17 | Added Transcription Engines screenshot. |
| 2026-06-23 | v0.10.0: noted the whisper.cpp Large V3 models and the sherpa-onnx Parakeet/Canary models; extended CUDA acceleration to sherpa-onnx. |