Models

Choose a model

The model argument accepts three forms:

transcribe audio.wav --model whisper-tiny            # curated alias (72 across all families)
transcribe audio.wav --model whisper-tiny --quant Q8_0
transcribe audio.wav /path/to/my-model.gguf           # local file, fully offline
transcribe audio.wav handy-computer/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3-gguf/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3-Q5_K_M.gguf

--list-models prints every alias with its quantization, license and size, and flags non-commercial licenses; --model-info <alias> gives the full record (pinned revision, sha256, license URL). Excerpts:

$ transcribe --list-models
alias                                    quant    license              size
breeze-asr-25                            Q5_K_M   apache-2.0         1106 MB
canary-1b                                Q5_K_M   cc-by-nc-4.0 !      798 MB
parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3                     Q5_K_M   cc-by-4.0           523 MB
whisper-large-v3-turbo                   Q5_K_M   apache-2.0          590 MB
…
! = non-commercial license; verify before any commercial use.

$ transcribe --model-info whisper-tiny
whisper-tiny
  repo       : handy-computer/whisper-tiny-gguf
  revision   : 2678cc66038359b97c8e6fd6454c56fc9006d571
  quant      : Q5_K_M
  file       : whisper-tiny-Q5_K_M.gguf
  size       : 42 MB
  license    : apache-2.0
  license url: https://huggingface.co/handy-computer/whisper-tiny-gguf

Alias or spec

Any GGUF that transcribe.cpp supports works through the generic <owner>/<repo>/<file.gguf>[@<revision>] form, so the alias list is a convenience, not a limit. Two differences from an alias: the license is unknown (only the model card is linked) and the sha256 comes from the HuggingFace metadata on every run, because a spec carries no hash of its own — so a spec needs the network even when the weights are already cached. A curated alias pins its revision and its sha256 in the shipped manifest, which is why it is offline from the second run on. Pinning @<revision> only removes the “which revision is current?” lookup, not the file lookup.

Caching

Models are cached under $XDG_CACHE_HOME/TranscribeCppSharp/models (%LOCALAPPDATA% on Windows, ~/Library/Caches on macOS). Weights are never bundled with the tool.

Model capabilities

A model is asked what it can do, not assumed. From the library:

Backends.InitDefault(); // optional: automatic in Model.Load, but explicit is clearer
var modelPath = TestConfig.ModelPath; // your GGUF model file, e.g. "test-models/ggml-tiny.bin"
using var model = Model.Load(modelPath, p => p.WithBackend(BackendRequest.BackendCpu));
var supportsPnc = model.Supports(Feature.FeaturePnc);
var caps = model.GetCapabilities();

model.Supports(Feature.FeatureDiarization) is the one worth calling before a run, because it is the only way to know in advance whether speaker attribution is possible — see Speaker diarization.

Model licenses

The MIT license covers this wrapper and the bundled native library, not the models you load with it. GGUF models come from different ecosystems with different licenses — some are permissive (MIT, Apache-2.0), some are non-commercial (e.g. CC-BY-NC-4.0 for some Parakeet/Canary variants). This project does not bundle or redistribute models, and it does not verify or curate their licenses.

Before using a model in a commercial product, check the license on the page you download it from (typically Hugging Face). The upstream transcribe.cpp docs describe each supported family and where its models come from; that is the source of truth, not this page.

transcribe.cpp supports every model family it can decode — 16 families upstream — and the alias set spans them: Whisper, Moonshine, Parakeet, Canary, GigaAM, Voxtral, Qwen3-ASR, MOSS diarization, and others.