whisper-base vs whisper-medium
Specs, VRAM requirements and download trends — updated 28 July 2026.
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 | 4,637,569 | 379,408 |
| Downloads all time | 55.3 M | 20.7 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 90 days (13 Aug – 10 Nov)
4.6 M305 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
whisper-medium · fp16
4.0 GB / 24 GB