Whisper on OpenAI, Groq and Cloudflare: Same-Audio Test
November 14, 2026
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We tested six Whisper variants on OpenAI, Groq and Cloudflare through Speechall with the same audio: three short clips and a 178.885-second recording (2 minutes 58.9 seconds). The test ran on November 14, 2026, with three repetitions per input and model: 72 requests across the benchmark timing runs.
On the longer file, Groq Large v3 had a median transcription time of 3.20 seconds, or 56.0× real-time speed. The tables below show the audio duration alongside transcription time, speedup, real-time factor and word errors.
Which Whisper models did we test?
| Host | Speechall model ID | Version or variant |
|---|---|---|
| OpenAI | openai.whisper-1 | Whisper-1; the Speechall catalog identifies it as Large v2. |
| Groq | groq.whisper-large-v3 | Whisper Large v3. |
| Groq | groq.whisper-large-v3-turbo | Whisper Large v3 Turbo. |
| Cloudflare | cloudflare.whisper | Standard Whisper entry; the catalog does not specify a weight version. |
| Cloudflare | cloudflare.whisper-large-v3-turbo | Whisper Large v3 Turbo. |
| Cloudflare | cloudflare.whisper-tiny-en | Whisper Tiny, English-only. |
These are different hosted Whisper options. Model size, version and serving configuration can all affect results, so the table does not isolate the effect of hosting hardware. In particular, Tiny English should not be treated as interchangeable with Large v3.
Groq’s documentation identifies its Large v3 and Turbo variants. Cloudflare documents standard Whisper, Large v3 Turbo and Tiny English. Provider sources and Speechall model availability were checked on the test date.
Longer audio: 2 minutes 58.9 seconds
Every model received the same 178.885-second WAV file, containing 481 reference words. Each row uses the median of three full-file transcription requests. Speedup = 178.885 ÷ median request time; real-time factor (RTF) = median request time ÷ 178.885. Higher speedup is faster; lower RTF is faster.
| Whisper option | Median transcription time | Real-time speedup ↑ | RTF ↓ | Pooled WER |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| OpenAI Whisper-1 | 13.00 s | 13.8× | 0.0727 | 1.66% (24/1443) |
| Groq Large v3 | 3.20 s | 56.0× | 0.0179 | 2.29% (33/1443) |
| Groq Large v3 Turbo | 3.43 s | 52.1× | 0.0192 | 1.87% (27/1443) |
| Cloudflare Whisper | 16.71 s | 10.7× | 0.0934 | 3.95% (57/1443) |
| Cloudflare Large v3 Turbo | 21.66 s | 8.3× | 0.1211 | 6.24% (90/1443) |
| Cloudflare Tiny English | 11.63 s | 15.4× | 0.0650 | 7.28% (105/1443) |
Request time includes uploading the 5,724,400-byte file and receiving the complete response, including network and service processing. WER pools edits across the three repeated references, so its denominator is 1,443 words. It measures transcript differences under the same normalization described below.
Listen to the audio and compare transcripts
Play or download the exact WAV used in the longer-file benchmark, then select any two models to compare their transcripts. You can also select the dataset reference in either column. Enable word highlighting to inspect differences; the original text retains each model’s punctuation and formatting.
The transcripts below were collected in a separate pass on the same file with the same settings on November 14, 2026. Each displayed WER belongs to that transcript; the timing table above still reports the original three-pass benchmark.
Download WAV (5.7 MB) · Download reference text
LibriSpeech · Panayotov, Chen, Povey and Khudanpur · CC BY 4.0. Consecutive chapter segments joined and converted to WAV, as described in the test procedure.
Concord returned to its place amidst the tents. The English forwarded to the French baskets of flowers, of which they had made a plentiful provision to greet the arrival of the young princess. The French, in return, invited the English to a supper, which was to be given the next day. Congratulations were poured in upon the princess everywhere during her journey. From the respect paid her on all sides she seemed like a queen, and from the adoration with which she was treated by two or three she appeared an object of worship. The queen mother gave the French the most affectionate reception. France was her native country, and she had suffered too much unhappiness in England for England to have made her forget France. She taught her daughter, then, by her own affection for it, that love for a country where they had both been hospitably received and where a brilliant future opened for them. The count had thrown himself back on his seat, leaning his shoulders against the partition of the tent, and remained thus, his face buried in his hands, with heaving chest and restless limbs. "'This has, indeed, been a harassing day,' continued the young man, his eyes fixed upon his friend. "'You will be frank with me?' "'I always am.' "'Can you imagine why Buckingham has been so violent?' "'I suspect.' "'It is you who are mistaken, Raoul. I have read his distress in his eyes, in his every gesture and action the whole day. I can perceive love clearly enough.' "'I am convinced of what I say,' said the count. "'It is annoyance, then. In those very terms I even added more. But,' continued Raoul, not interrupted by this movement of his friend, "'Heaven be praised! The French, who are pronounced to be thoughtless and indiscreet, reckless even, are capable of bringing a calm and sound judgment to bear on matters of such high importance. Thus it is that the honor of three is saved, our country, our masters, and our own. Yes, I need repose. Many things have agitated me to-day, both in mind and body. When you return to-morrow I shall no longer be the same man.' But in this friendly pressure Raoul could detect the nervous agitation of a great internal conflict. The night was clear, starlit, and splendid. The tempest had passed away, and the sweet influences of the evening had restored life, peace, and security everywhere. Upon the large square in front of the hotel the shadows of the tents, intersected by the golden moonbeams, formed, as it were, a huge mosaic of jet and yellow flagstones. Bragolon watched for some time the conduct of the two lovers, listened to the loud and civil slumbers of Mannekamp, who snored as imperiously as though he were wearing his blue and gold, instead of his violet suit.
concord returned to its place amidst the tents the english forwarded to the french baskets of flowers of which they had made a plentiful provision to greet the arrival of the young princess the french in return invited the english to a supper which was to be given the next day congratulations were poured in upon the princess everywhere during her journey from the respect paid her on all sides she seemed like a queen and from the adoration with which she was treated by two or three she appeared an object of worship the queen mother gave the french the most affectionate reception france was her native country and she had suffered too much unhappiness in england for england to have made her forget france she taught her daughter then by her own affection for it that love for a country where they had both been hospitably received and where a brilliant future opened for them The Count had thrown himself back on his seat, leaning his shoulders against the partition of the tent, and remained thus, his face buried in his hands, with heaving chest and restless limbs. This has indeed been a harassing day, continued the young man, his eyes fixed upon his friend. You will be frank with me? I always am. Can you imagine why Buckingham has been so violent? I suspect. It is you who are mistaken Rowell I have read his distress in his eyes in his every gesture and action the whole day i can perceive love clearly enough i am convinced of what i say said the count it is annoyance then in those very terms i even added more but continued rowell not interrupted by this movement of his friend heaven be praised the french who are pronounced to be thoughtless and indiscreet reckless even are capable of bringing a calm and sound judgment to bear on matters of such high importance thus it is that the honor of three is saved our country our masters and our own yes i need repose many things have agitated me to-day both in mind and body when you return to-morrow i shall no longer be the same man but in this friendly pressure rao could detect the nervous agitation of a great internal conflict the night was clear starlit and splendid the tempest had passed away and the sweet influences of the evening had restored life peace and security everywhere upon the large square in front of the hotel the shadows of the tents intersected by the golden moonbeams formed as it were a huge mosaic of jet and yellow flagstones bragelon watched for some time the conduct of the two lovers listened to the loud and uncivil slumbers of manikamp who snored as imperiously as though he was wearing his blue and gold instead of his violet suit
Read all six original transcripts
OpenAI Whisper-1
Concord returned to its place amidst the tents. The English forwarded to the French baskets of flowers, of which they had made a plentiful provision to greet the arrival of the young princess. The French, in return, invited the English to a supper, which was to be given the next day. Congratulations were poured in upon the princess everywhere during her journey. From the respect paid her on all sides she seemed like a queen, and from the adoration with which she was treated by two or three she appeared an object of worship. The queen mother gave the French the most affectionate reception. France was her native country, and she had suffered too much unhappiness in England for England to have made her forget France. She taught her daughter, then, by her own affection for it, that love for a country where they had both been hospitably received and where a brilliant future opened for them. The count had thrown himself back on his seat, leaning his shoulders against the partition of the tent, and remained thus, his face buried in his hands, with heaving chest and restless limbs. "'This has, indeed, been a harassing day,' continued the young man, his eyes fixed upon his friend. "'You will be frank with me?' "'I always am.' "'Can you imagine why Buckingham has been so violent?' "'I suspect.' "'It is you who are mistaken, Raoul. I have read his distress in his eyes, in his every gesture and action the whole day. I can perceive love clearly enough.' "'I am convinced of what I say,' said the count. "'It is annoyance, then. In those very terms I even added more. But,' continued Raoul, not interrupted by this movement of his friend, "'Heaven be praised! The French, who are pronounced to be thoughtless and indiscreet, reckless even, are capable of bringing a calm and sound judgment to bear on matters of such high importance. Thus it is that the honor of three is saved, our country, our masters, and our own. Yes, I need repose. Many things have agitated me to-day, both in mind and body. When you return to-morrow I shall no longer be the same man.' But in this friendly pressure Raoul could detect the nervous agitation of a great internal conflict. The night was clear, starlit, and splendid. The tempest had passed away, and the sweet influences of the evening had restored life, peace, and security everywhere. Upon the large square in front of the hotel the shadows of the tents, intersected by the golden moonbeams, formed, as it were, a huge mosaic of jet and yellow flagstones. Bragolon watched for some time the conduct of the two lovers, listened to the loud and civil slumbers of Mannekamp, who snored as imperiously as though he were wearing his blue and gold, instead of his violet suit.
Groq Large v3
concord returned to its place amidst the tents the english forwarded to the french baskets of flowers of which they had made a plentiful provision to greet the arrival of the young princess the french in return invited the english to a supper which was to be given the next day congratulations were poured in upon the princess everywhere during her journey from the respect paid her on all sides she seemed like a queen and from the adoration with which she was treated by two or three she appeared an object of worship the queen-mother gave the french the most affectionate reception france was her native country and she had suffered too much unhappiness in england for england to have made her forget france She taught her daughter, then, by her own affection for it, that love for a country where they had both been hospitably received, and where a brilliant future opened for them. The Count had thrown himself back on his seat, leaning his shoulders against the partition of the tent, and remained thus, his face buried in his hands, with heaving chest and restless limbs. "'This has, indeed, been a harassing day,' continued the young man, his eyes fixed upon his friend. "'You will be frank with me?' "'I always am.' "'Can you imagine why Buckingham has been so violent?' "'I suspect.' is you who are mistaken Raoul I have read his distress in his eyes in his every gesture and action the whole day I can perceive love clearly enough I am convinced of what I say, said the Count. It is annoyance, then. In those very terms I even added more. But, continued Raoul, not interrupted by this movement of his friend, heaven be praised, the French, who are pronounced to be thoughtless and indiscreet, reckless even, are capable of bringing a calm and sound judgment to bear on matters of such high importance. Thus, it is that the honor of three is saved, our country, our masters, and our own. Yes, I need repose. Many things have agitated me today, both in mind and body. When you return tomorrow, I shall no longer be the same man. But in this friendly pressure, Rao could detect the nervous agitation of a great internal conflict. The night was clear, starlit, and splendid. The tempest had passed away, and the sweet influences of the evening had restored life, peace, and security everywhere. Upon the large square in front of the hotel, the shadows of the tents, intersected by the golden moonbeams, formed, as it were, a huge mosaic of jet and yellow flagstones. bragelonne watched for some time the conduct of the two lovers listened to the loud and uncivil slumbers of mannekamp who snored as imperiously as though he was wearing his blue and gold instead of his violet suit
Groq Large v3 Turbo
concord returned to its place amidst the tents the english forwarded to the french baskets of flowers of which they had made a plentiful provision to greet the arrival of the young princess the french in return invited the english to a supper which was to be given the next day congratulations were poured in upon the princess everywhere during her journey from the respect paid her on all sides she seemed like a queen and from the adoration with which she was treated by two or three she appeared an object of worship the queen mother gave the french the most affectionate reception france was her native country and she had suffered too much unhappiness in england for england to have made her forget france she taught her daughter then by her own affection for it that love for a country where they had both been hospitably received and where a brilliant future opened for them The Count had thrown himself back on his seat, leaning his shoulders against the partition of the tent, and remained thus, his face buried in his hands, with heaving chest and restless limbs. This has indeed been a harassing day, continued the young man, his eyes fixed upon his friend. You will be frank with me? I always am. Can you imagine why Buckingham has been so violent? I suspect. It is you who are mistaken Rowell I have read his distress in his eyes in his every gesture and action the whole day i can perceive love clearly enough i am convinced of what i say said the count it is annoyance then in those very terms i even added more but continued rowell not interrupted by this movement of his friend heaven be praised the french who are pronounced to be thoughtless and indiscreet reckless even are capable of bringing a calm and sound judgment to bear on matters of such high importance thus it is that the honor of three is saved our country our masters and our own yes i need repose many things have agitated me to-day both in mind and body when you return to-morrow i shall no longer be the same man but in this friendly pressure rao could detect the nervous agitation of a great internal conflict the night was clear starlit and splendid the tempest had passed away and the sweet influences of the evening had restored life peace and security everywhere upon the large square in front of the hotel the shadows of the tents intersected by the golden moonbeams formed as it were a huge mosaic of jet and yellow flagstones bragelon watched for some time the conduct of the two lovers listened to the loud and uncivil slumbers of manikamp who snored as imperiously as though he was wearing his blue and gold instead of his violet suit
Cloudflare Whisper
Concorde returned to its place amidst the tents. The English, forwarded to the French baskets of flowers of which they had made a plentiful provision to greet the arrival of the young princess. The French, in return, invited the English to a supper, which was to be given the next day. Congratulations were poured in upon the princess everywhere during her journey. From the respect paid her on all sides, she seemed like a queen, and from the adoration with which she was treated by two or three, she appeared an object of worship. The Queen Mother gave the French the most affectionate reception. France was her native country, and she had suffered too much unhappiness in England for England to have made her forget France. She taught her daughter, then, by her own affection for it, that love for a country where they had both been hospitably received and where a brilliant future opened for them. The count had thrown himself back on his seat, leaning his shoulders against the partition of the tent and remained thus, his face buried in his hands with heaving chest and restless limbs. This has indeed been a harassing day continued the young man, his eyes fixed upon his friend. You will be frank with me, I always am. Can you imagine why Buckingham has been so violent? I suspect. It is you who are mistaken, Raul. I have read his distress in his eyes, in his every gesture and action the whole day. I can perceive love clearly enough. I am convinced of what I say, said the Count. It is annoyance, then. In those very terms I even had it more. But continued Raul, not interrupted by this movement of his friend, heaven be praised the French who are pronounced to be thoughtless and indiscreet, reckless even, are capable of bringing a calm and sound judgment to bear on matters of such high importance. Thus, it is that the honor of three is saved, our country, our masters, and our own. Yes, I need repose, many things have agitated me today, both in mind and body. When you return tomorrow, I shall no longer be the same man. But in this friendly pressure, Rao could detect the nervous agitation of a great internal conflict. The night was clear, Starlet and Splendid.est had passed away and the sweet influences of the evening had restored life, peace and security everywhere. Upon the large square in front of the hotel, the shadows of the tents intersected by the golden moonbeams formed as it were a huge mosaic of jet and yellow flagstones. Braggelon watched for some time, the conduct of the two lovers, listened to the loud and uncivil slumbers of Manicamp, who snored as empirously as though he was wearing his blue and gold instead of his violet suit.
Cloudflare Large v3 Turbo
concord returned to its place amidst the tents the english forwarded to the french baskets of flowers of which they had made a plentiful provision to greet the arrival of the young princess the french in return invited the english to a supper which was to be given the next day congratulations were poured in upon the princess everywhere during her journey from the respect paid her on all sides she seemed like a queen and from the adoration with which she was treated by two or three she appeared an object of worship the queen mother gave the french the most affectionate reception france was her native country and she had suffered too much unhappiness in england for england to have made her forget france she taught her daughter then by her own affection for it that love for a country where they had both been hospitably received and where a brilliant future opened for them the count had thrown himself back on his seat leaning his shoulders against the partition of the tent and remained thus his face buried in his hands with heaving chest and restless limbs this has indeed been a harassing day continued the young man his eyes fixed upon his friend you will be frank with me i always am can you imagine why buckingham has been so violent i suspect it is you who are mistaken ral i have read his distress in his eyes in his every gesture and action the whole day i can perceive love clearly enough i am convinced of what i say said the count it is annoyance then in those very terms i even added more but continued ral not interrupted by this movement of his friend heaven be praised the french who are pronounced to be thoughtless and indiscreet reckless even are capable of bringing a calm and sound judgment to bear on matters of such high importance thus it is that the honor of three is saved our country our masters and our own yes i need repose many things have agitated me today both in mind and body when you return tomorrow i shall no longer be the same man but in this friendly pressure ral could detect the nervous agitation of a great internal conflict the night was clear starlit and splendid the tempest had passed away and the sweet influences of the evening had restored life peace and security everywhere upon the large square upon the large square in front of the hotel the shadows of the tents intersected by the golden moonbeams formed as it were a huge mosaic of jet and yellow flagstones bragalon watched for some time the conduct of the two lovers listened to the loud and uncivil slumbers of manikamp who snored as imperiously as though he was wearing his blue and gold instead of his violet suit bragalon watched for some time he was wearing his blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and blue and Thank you.
Cloudflare Tiny English
Concord returned to its place amidst the tents. The English phoated two to French baskets of flowers of which they had made a plentiful provision to greet the arrival of the young princess. The French in return invited the English to a supper, which was to be given the next day. Congratulations, report in upon the princess everywhere during her journey. From the respect paid her on all signs, she seemed like a queen, and from the adoration with which she was treated by two or three, she appeared in object of worship. The Queen Mother gave the French the most affectionate reception. France was her native country, and she had suffered too much unhappiness in England for England to have made her forget France. She taught her daughter, then, by her own affection for it, that love for a country where they had both been hospitably received and were a brilliant future open for them. The count had thrown himself back on his seat, leaning his shoulders against the partition of the tent and remained thus, his face buried in his hands, with heaving chest and restless limbs. This has indeed been a harassing day, continued the young man, his eyes fixed upon his friend. You will be frank with me? I always am. Can you imagine why Buckingham has been so violent? I suspect. It is you who are mistaken, Raul, I have read his distress in his eyes, in his every gesture and action the whole day. I can perceive love clearly enough. I am convinced of what I say, so the count. It is annoyance, that in those very terms I even had it more. But continued Raul, not interrupted by this movement of his friend, Heavenly praise the The French, who are pronounced to be thoughtless and indiscreet reckless even, are capable of bringing a calm and sound judgment to bear on matter of such high importance. Thus, it is that the honor of three is saved, our country, our masters, and our own. Yes, I need repose. Many things have agitated me today, both in mind and body. When you return tomorrow, I shall no longer be the same man. But in this friendly pressure, Raoul could detect the nervous agitation of a great internal conflict. The night was clear, Starlet and Splendid. The tempest had passed away and the sweet influences of the evening had restored life, peace and security everywhere. Upon the large square in front of the hotel, the shadows of the tents intersected by the golden moon beams formed as it were a huge mosaic of jet and yellow flag stones. Raggleon watched for some time, the conduct of the two lovers, listened to the loud and unsilvel slumbers of Manicamp, who snored as impreasly as though he was wearing his blue and gold instead of his violet suit.
How we made the longer file
We joined all 21 consecutive segments of LibriSpeech chapter 6930/75918, from 6930-75918-0000 through 6930-75918-0020, in their original numeric order. We concatenated the corresponding dataset references in the same order and encoded the audio as 16-bit PCM WAV with its original sample rate and channel count. The recording contains a single speaker reading a chapter; it is a reconstruction from segmented audio, with no added silence. It includes one of the earlier short clips, so it is not wholly independent of the short test.
All models used the same request settings as the short test: English, JSON output, punctuation enabled, diarization disabled, no prompts or reference hints. Requests ran sequentially; we rotated model order between three passes. This one chapter gives a longer-file observation, not a general estimate for hour-long recordings, meetings or other languages.
Download the longer-file results JSON for each request’s timing and scores, input hashes and the exact source segments. Reproduce it with the same recipe and the long-audio option:
# Prepare the chapter and validate manifests without transcription requests.
python3 scripts/examples/reproduce-librispeech-comparison.py /tmp/whisper-long --profile whisper --audio long
# With SPEECHALL_API_KEY set, send 18 billable requests: 6 models × 3 passes.
python3 scripts/examples/reproduce-librispeech-comparison.py /tmp/whisper-long --profile whisper --audio long --executeShort clips: how much faster than real time was transcription?
Speedup = audio duration ÷ transcription turnaround. A 10-second recording returned in 0.5 seconds is transcribed at 20× real-time speed. Real-time factor (RTF) = turnaround ÷ audio duration; the same example has an RTF of 0.05. Higher speedup is faster; lower RTF is faster.
Each model processed the three clips three times: 88.695 seconds of audio across nine requests. The table divides that total audio duration by the sum of its measured request times. It does not divide one average clip duration by an unrelated median latency.
| Whisper option | Total request time for 88.695 s of audio | Real-time speedup ↑ | RTF ↓ | Pooled WER |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| OpenAI Whisper-1 | 17.43 s | 5.1× | 0.1965 | 0.00% (0/285) |
| Groq Large v3 | 4.35 s | 20.4× | 0.0491 | 0.00% (0/285) |
| Groq Large v3 Turbo | 3.42 s | 25.9× | 0.0386 | 0.00% (0/285) |
| Cloudflare Whisper | 45.59 s | 1.9× | 0.5140 | 2.11% (6/285) |
| Cloudflare Large v3 Turbo | 17.09 s | 5.2× | 0.1927 | 0.00% (0/285) |
| Cloudflare Tiny English | 16.60 s | 5.3× | 0.1871 | 14.74% (42/285) |
The timing starts with the HTTP upload and ends when the complete response has arrived. It includes the client network, Speechall and provider processing; gaps between requests are excluded. This is end-to-end file-transcription speed, rather than isolated model inference or live-stream partial-transcript latency.
Speed on each audio file
Every cell shows median transcription time → real-time speedup for that specific file, based on three requests. The column headings give the actual audio duration, so you can compare a request’s turnaround directly with its recording length.
| Whisper option | 5.850-second audio | 6.285-second audio | 17.430-second audio |
|---|---|---|---|
| OpenAI Whisper-1 | 1.55 s → 3.8× | 1.83 s → 3.4× | 2.46 s → 7.1× |
| Groq Large v3 | 0.40 s → 14.5× | 0.43 s → 14.5× | 0.62 s → 28.0× |
| Groq Large v3 Turbo | 0.31 s → 18.7× | 0.35 s → 18.1× | 0.42 s → 41.0× |
| Cloudflare Whisper | 3.71 s → 1.6× | 1.80 s → 3.5× | 2.55 s → 6.8× |
| Cloudflare Large v3 Turbo | 1.42 s → 4.1× | 1.62 s → 3.9× | 2.42 s → 7.2× |
| Cloudflare Tiny English | 1.34 s → 4.4× | 1.49 s → 4.2× | 2.33 s → 7.5× |
The overall table includes all nine request timings for each model; the per-file table uses medians of three. A slow individual response therefore affects the overall speedup more than the per-file median. These short clips do not establish the speed of transcribing an hour-long file, and request overhead matters more for short recordings.
Each row’s word error rate (WER) is total word edits divided by total reference words after applying the same normalization to every model. The denominator of 285 is the 95-word reference repeated three times.
What the accuracy results tell us
Four variants tied at zero normalized edits on these clips. That does not establish equal accuracy on other recordings, and the test cannot separate their accuracy meaningfully. Cloudflare standard Whisper produced six edits across the repeated references (2.11% WER), while Tiny English produced 42 (14.74%). Those are observations on this particular read-English sample.
WER counts substitutions, deletions and insertions. Our scorer applies Unicode NFKC normalization, lowercase, replaces punctuation and symbols with spaces, and splits on whitespace. It retains accents and does not expand numbers. A zero score under this policy does not mean perfect punctuation, timestamps, speaker attribution or transcription of specialist terms.
Comparing the two Turbo options
Groq and Cloudflare both expose a Large v3 Turbo option. Across the same 88.695 seconds of repeated audio, Groq achieved 25.9× real-time speed and Cloudflare achieved 5.2×, with zero normalized word edits for both. This makes Groq Turbo a useful starting point for testing short-file transcription speed; deployment settings, network conditions and longer recordings can change the result.
What does each option cost?
These are the Speechall catalog rates checked November 14, 2026, expressed as USD credit usage. The 100-hour column multiplies that rate by 100; it is a budgeting example, not a measured invoice.
| Whisper option | Catalog USD / audio hour | Estimated credits for 100 audio hours |
|---|---|---|
| OpenAI Whisper-1 | $0.360 | $36.00 |
| Groq Large v3 | $0.111 | $11.10 |
| Groq Large v3 Turbo | $0.040 | $4.00 |
| Cloudflare Whisper | $0.027 | $2.70 |
| Cloudflare Large v3 Turbo | $0.0306 | $3.06 |
| Cloudflare Tiny English | $0.027 | $2.70 |
Cloudflare’s standard and Tiny entries have the lowest listed hourly rate, while Groq Turbo combines a low catalog rate with the highest measured real-time speedup in the short-clip test. Tiny’s lower rate came with more word edits on our sample. Choose with both transcript quality and cost in view, then verify your own audio.
Actual billed charges for these requests were not reconciled. Minimum charges, rounding or account terms can change a bill; catalog-rate multiplication does not establish the charge for a short clip. Speechall also adds a fee when you purchase credits, shown in the billing quote. These rates are not direct-provider price quotes.
The short audio and test procedure
We reused exactly the same WAV bytes and dataset references as our earlier speech-to-text comparison. The clips come from LibriSpeech test-clean, with a different speaker for each clip.
| Clip ID | Duration | Reference words |
|---|---|---|
| 6930-75918-0006 | 5.850 s | 17 |
| 1320-122617-0003 | 6.285 s | 22 |
| 5639-40744-0032 | 17.430 s | 56 |
The clips were selected before model requests: the first 5–20-second clip encountered for each of the first three speakers in archive order. Source FLAC files were converted losslessly to 16-bit PCM WAV using ffmpeg, preserving sample rate and channels. Reference transcripts are supplied by the dataset; we did not make additional human corrections.
All requests used Speechall’s raw upload endpoint, English, JSON output, punctuation enabled and diarization disabled. We supplied no reference text, vocabulary hints or model-specific prompts. Requests ran sequentially, with a fixed clip order and the model list rotated by two positions between repetitions. No warm-up requests were discarded. The client was one local workstation over an uncontrolled network; provider processing regions were unknown.
Three clips and three repetitions help check the request path and compare this workload. They do not provide coverage of meetings, overlapping speech, background noise, other languages or domain vocabulary. Repeating a clip does not create a new independent speech sample. LibriSpeech is public, and some models may have encountered this material during training.
Download and reproduce the short test
Download the dated Whisper results JSON for the audio durations, per-request timings, real-time factors, speedups and scores, exact model order, audio and reference hashes, scoring-script hash and catalog rates. Account request identifiers and API keys are omitted.
The reproduction recipe downloads the same selected clips and prepares the WAV files and manifests. Run it from the website repository with Python 3, Node 22+, ffmpeg and ffprobe:
# Prepare audio and validate all nine manifests without transcription requests.
python3 scripts/examples/reproduce-librispeech-comparison.py /tmp/whisper-comparison --profile whisper
# With SPEECHALL_API_KEY already set, send the 54 billable requests.
python3 scripts/examples/reproduce-librispeech-comparison.py /tmp/whisper-comparison --profile whisper --executeLibriSpeech attribution: Vassil Panayotov, Guoguo Chen, Daniel Povey and Sanjeev Khudanpur, “LibriSpeech: an ASR corpus based on public domain audio books,” ICASSP 2015. OpenSLR distributes the corpus under CC BY 4.0. Our modifications are subset selection and FLAC-to-WAV conversion. The dataset authors do not endorse this comparison.
Try Whisper on your own audio
Start with the public comparison guide, then use the playground to try your recording. In an API request, change the model ID to switch between the Whisper options above:
curl --fail-with-body --request POST
"https://api.speechall.com/v1/transcribe?model=groq.whisper-large-v3-turbo&language=en&output_format=json&punctuation=true&diarization=false"
--header "Authorization: Bearer $SPEECHALL_API_KEY"
--header "Content-Type: audio/wav"
--data-binary @audio.wavUse a Speechall API key, keep it on your server, and check each model’s supported languages, file limits and subtitle formats before switching. The Whisper pricing page compares catalog options, and the API quickstart explains keys and credits.
For new integrations, also check model lifecycle dates: OpenAI lists Whisper-1 for shutdown on February 26, 2027, and Cloudflare’s Tiny English page lists planned deprecation on November 20, 2026. These are dated measurements of the options available when tested.