How long does it take to transcribe an hour of audio locally? Public benchmark times, scaled from 13 minutes to 60, with the caveats.
Short answer. From about one minute to half an hour, depending on the program, the model size and the hardware. Scaling the faster-whisper project’s 13-minute benchmark to 60 minutes, the large-v2 model on an RTX 3070 Ti would take about 1.2 to 11 minutes, and the small model on an 8-thread Core i7-12700K about 3.9 to 32 minutes. These are estimates by simple proportion from one set of recordings, not promises. Hindi, noisy rooms and several speakers change the result.
01
How the estimate is made
The faster-whisper project publishes the time and memory needed to transcribe 13 minutes of audio with several programs. This page multiplies each time by 60 ÷ 13, about 4.6, to show an hour. That assumes the time grows in proportion to the audio, which is a fair approximation for batch transcription of similar recordings and is not a measurement. Every figure here is an estimate.
02
On a GPU: large-v2 on an RTX 3070 Ti
The benchmark ran on an NVIDIA RTX 3070 Ti with 8 GB, using CUDA 12.4. The large-v2 model has the same size as large-v3.
Program and precision (beam size 5)
Measured, 13 minutes
Estimated, 60 minutes
openai/whisper, 16-bit
2 min 23 s
11.0 min
transformers (SDPA), 16-bit
1 min 52 s
8.6 min
whisper.cpp with flash attention, 16-bit
1 min 05 s
5.0 min
faster-whisper, 16-bit
1 min 03 s
4.8 min
faster-whisper, 8-bit
59 s
4.5 min
faster-whisper, 16-bit, batch size 8
17 s
1.3 min
faster-whisper, 8-bit, batch size 8
16 s
1.2 min
03
On a CPU: small on a Core i7-12700K
The CPU runs used 8 threads on an Intel Core i7-12700K and the small model, which is less accurate than large.
Program and precision (beam size 5)
Measured, 13 minutes
Estimated, 60 minutes
openai/whisper, 32-bit
6 min 58 s
32.2 min
whisper.cpp, 32-bit
2 min 05 s
9.6 min
whisper.cpp with OpenVINO, 32-bit
1 min 45 s
8.1 min
faster-whisper, 32-bit
2 min 37 s
12.1 min
faster-whisper, 32-bit, batch size 8
1 min 06 s
5.1 min
faster-whisper, 8-bit
1 min 42 s
7.8 min
faster-whisper, 8-bit, batch size 8
51 s
3.9 min
04
What changes the numbers
Model size. OpenAI’s relative speeds, measured on an A100, run from about 10 times for tiny and 4 for small to 2 for medium, 1 for large and about 8 for turbo.
Language and audio quality. Hindi, Hinglish, accents, cross-talk and noise can slow decoding and lower accuracy.
Extra steps. Labelling who said what, writing minutes and extracting actions are separate jobs, not part of these timings.
Competition for the machine. A language model answering questions at the same time slows both.
05
Real time and ANVE
Every row above finishes faster than the recording lasts, the slowest being a 6 min 58 s run for 13 minutes of audio, which is 1.9 times real time. Live captioning is a streaming problem that these batch figures do not measure. ANVE’s meeting minutes start from a transcript in Hindi, English or Hinglish; ANVE has not published timings for its launch hardware.
06
Questions people ask
Is real-time transcription possible locally?
Batch transcription of a finished recording is faster than real time in every benchmark row here. Live captions need a streaming setup, which these figures do not cover.
Can I leave transcription running overnight?
Yes. That is the easiest way to use a slower machine: queue the recordings and collect the transcripts in the morning. The figures above show the time per hour of audio so you can size the queue.
Why do the estimates differ from my own tests?
Real recordings contain silence, several speakers and different languages, and the benchmark used one 13-minute file. Treat the numbers as ratios between programs more than as promises about your audio.
07
What is not real yet
No sealed ANVE unit exists; every image of the appliance on this site is a labelled render. The software runs today on a development machine. No customers yet, no certifications, no delivery date, and the final price is not announced.
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