All the open-source Whisper variations

When OpenAI open-sourced Whisper, a great speech-to-text model was provided but it lacked some key features such as speaker diarization and word-level timestamps. To address these gaps, various Whisper variants were developed, including WhisperX, which adds automatic speaker recognition and speed, making it ideal for multi-speaker transcriptions; Whisper JAX, which offers extreme speed on TPU v4 hardware; Whisper.cpp, a lightweight C++ implementation that allows edge device usage; Distil-Whisper, a smaller and faster version of Whisper; and Whisper Streaming, a real-time transcription model. Ultimately, the best choice depends on specific needs such as accuracy, speaker identification, scalability, or offline processing, with WhisperX being recommended for its balance of ease-of-use and performance.