Seventeen Megabytes, Seven Languages

Cactus Compute released Whistle, a 16.9MB speech-to-text model that beats Whisper base on most benchmarks at less than a ninth of the size. It runs on CPU with no dependencies, targets 17 platforms including microcontrollers and WASI, and shares its runtime engine with the company's Needle LLM.

Read more →

Apple's On-Device Speech Now Beats Whisper Small

Inscribe's benchmark of Apple's new SpeechAnalyzer API on macOS 26.5.1 finds it achieves 2.12% word error rate versus Whisper Small's 3.74%, while running three times faster — at the cost of covering roughly 30 languages instead of 100+.

Read more →