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    Models/Speech & Audio/distil-whisper/distil-large-v3
    HFTranscriptionMIT

    distil-large-v3

    by distil-whisper

    6x faster speech recognition distilled from Whisper Large v3

    Identifiers
    Model ID
    distil-whisper/distil-large-v3
    Feature URI
    mixpeek://transcription@v1/distilwhisper_large_v3

    Overview

    Distil-Whisper Large v3 is a knowledge-distilled variant of OpenAI's Whisper Large v3 that achieves within 1% word error rate of the teacher model while running 6.3x faster. The distillation process copies the full encoder and selects a subset of maximally spaced decoder layers, reducing the parameter count by 51% without significant quality loss.

    On Mixpeek, Distil-Whisper is the recommended transcription model for high-throughput pipelines where you need to process large audio and video libraries quickly while maintaining near-Whisper-level accuracy.

    Architecture

    Encoder-decoder Transformer. The encoder is entirely copied from Whisper Large v3 and frozen during training. The decoder uses a subset of the teacher's decoder layers, initialized from maximally spaced positions. Trained via knowledge distillation on pseudo-labeled audio data.

    Mixpeek SDK Integration

    // No extractor parameter takes a Hugging Face model id (checked against
    // GET /v1/discovery/extractors, which returns 13), so distil-large-v3 runs
    // on your side and the output is upserted through POST
    // /v1/namespaces/{namespace_id}/documents/upsert. On Enterprise the other
    // path is to upload the weights instead: POST /v1/namespaces/{id}/models
    // accepts the huggingface format and a custom plugin loads them.
    const res = await fetch(
      "https://api.mixpeek.com/v1/namespaces/ns_your_namespace/documents/upsert",
      {
        method: "POST",
        headers: {
          Authorization: "Bearer API_KEY",
          "Content-Type": "application/json",
        },
        body: JSON.stringify({
          collection_id: "col_your_collection",
          documents: [
            {
              document_id: "asset-00412",
              // The model produces text, so it lands in payload. Give the
              // collection a text vector index and embed that text to make it
              // searchable rather than only filterable.
              payload: { extracted_text: modelOutput, source_key: "archive/2026/asset-00412" },
              vectors: { "text-embedding": embeddingOfModelOutput },
            },
          ],
        }),
      },
    );
    
    // Managed alternative, if this exact model is not the requirement:
    // universal_extractor@v1 runs google/gemini-embedding-2
    // (3072-d) over a bucket, with no inference of your own.

    Capabilities

    • 6.3x faster than Whisper Large v3
    • Within 1% WER of the teacher on long-form audio
    • 51% fewer parameters than Whisper Large v3
    • Word-level timestamps and language detection
    • Robust to background noise and accents

    Use Cases on Mixpeek

    High-throughput transcription of large video archives where speed is critical
    Real-time subtitle generation for live streaming pipelines
    Cost-efficient batch processing of audio content at scale

    Benchmarks

    DatasetMetricScoreSource
    LibriSpeech (test-clean)WER~2.1%Gandhi et al., 2023: within 1% of Whisper Large v3
    OOD short-form (4 datasets)Avg WERWithin 1.5% of teacherDistil-Whisper model card
    Long-form (sequential)WER delta< 1% vs Large v3Distil-Whisper model card

    Performance

    Input Size30s audio chunks
    GPU Latency~50ms / 30s chunk (A100)
    GPU Throughput~35× realtime (A100)
    GPU Memory~1.6 GB

    756M params: 6.3x faster than Whisper Large v3 with near-identical accuracy

    Specification

    FrameworkHF
    Organizationdistil-whisper
    FeatureTranscription
    Outputtext + timestamps
    Modalitiesvideo, audio
    RetrieverTranscript Search
    Parameters756M
    LicenseMIT
    Downloads/mo4.8M

    Research Paper

    Distil-Whisper: Robust Knowledge Distillation via Large-Scale Pseudo Labelling

    arxiv.org

    Build a pipeline with distil-large-v3

    Add this model to a processing pipeline alongside other extractors. Combine with retrieval stages for end-to-end search.

    Run it on your own data, free