whisper-base vs whisper-medium

Specs, VRAM requirements and download trends — updated 28 July 2026.

openai · A
Params
70 M
Context
30d
4.8 M
apache-2.0 · commercial OK
openai · B
Params
760 M
Context
30d
364 K
apache-2.0 · commercial OK

Specification comparison

Differences are highlighted; identical values are muted.

Specification whisper-base whisper-medium
Parameters 70 M 760 M
Architecture WhisperForConditionalGeneration WhisperForConditionalGeneration
Context length
Licence apache-2.0 apache-2.0
Commercial use Allowed Allowed
Languages 99 99
Downloads 30d 4,759,784 364,045
Downloads all time 46.7 M 19.7 M
Quantizations on the Hub SAFETENSORS SAFETENSORS
Gated No No
Common Voice 11.0 (reported) 131 53.87
LibriSpeech (clean) (reported) 5.0087691176193 2.9
LibriSpeech (other) (reported) 12.849362732121 5.9
First seen on the Hub 2022-09-26 2022-09-26

Download trend

Daily snapshots, last 10 days (28 Jul – 6 Aug)

6.4 M352 K
whisper-base whisper-medium

VRAM side by side

On RTX 4090 · 24 GB · 8K context unless noted

whisper-base · fp16 0.8 GB / 24 GB
✅ Runs comfortably
whisper-medium · fp16 4.0 GB / 24 GB
✅ Runs comfortably

Adjacent comparisons