Moonshine

Edge-optimized speech recognition models that beat Whisper on speed and accuracy for on-device use.

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About

Moonshine targets speech recognition on hardware where Whisper is impractical, from laptops down to Raspberry Pi boards, microcontrollers, and wearables. The models scale from 26M parameters up to a 245M medium streaming variant that reaches 6.65 percent word error rate, better than the 7.44 percent of Whisper large-v3, while transcribing a clip in 107 ms on a MacBook Pro versus more than 11 seconds for Whisper. Streaming variants cache encoder and decoder state to avoid redundant computation, and the repository has grown into the Moonshine Voice toolkit, adding on-device text-to-speech in 16 languages, voice activity detection, speaker identification, and intent recognition, with speech recognition covering English, Spanish, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Ukrainian, and Arabic. Inference runs through ONNX Runtime; installation is pip install moonshine-voice, with Swift Package Manager, Maven Central, and C++ libraries covering iOS, Android, and Windows. Everything executes locally with no API keys, and the MIT license covers code and models, from Moonshine AI, formerly Useful Sensors.

Should you use Moonshine?

Pick it when

Pick Moonshine for on-device or streaming recognition on laptops, Raspberry Pi boards, phones, or wearables, when you want low latency without a GPU and an MIT license covering both code and models.

Look elsewhere when

Skip it if your languages fall outside the eight it supports for ASR, or if you need speech translation; Whisper and Whisper.cpp cover about 99 languages and translate into English.

Alternatives to Moonshine

  • Whisper.cpp

    Whisper's full multilingual coverage on CPUs and phones, but heavier per clip than Moonshine's small streaming models.

  • Vosk

    Compact 50 MB models in 20+ languages with runtime command grammars, more languages than Moonshine but with lower accuracy than large modern models.

  • Sherpa-ONNX STT

    Also ONNX-based, adding WebAssembly targets and a runtime that hosts many prebuilt model families, at the cost of choosing and tuning one yourself.

  • WhisperKit

    Better integrated on Apple devices, running Whisper through Core ML and the Neural Engine, but limited to Apple platforms.

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