What you need to run Whisper large-v3 turbo

About Whisper large-v3 turbo

Whisper large-v3 turbo is a speech or music model from OpenAI. Speech to text in 90+ languages. Free, private transcripts. Running it locally needs about 4 GB of memory.

Smallest Mac that runs it

The least memory you need, by Apple chip:

• M1: from 8 GB
• M1 Pro: from 16 GB
• M1 Max: from 32 GB
• M1 Ultra: from 64 GB
• M2: from 8 GB
• M2 Pro: from 16 GB
• M2 Max: from 32 GB
• M2 Ultra: from 64 GB
• M3: from 8 GB
• M3 Pro: from 18 GB
• M3 Max: from 36 GB
• M3 Ultra: from 96 GB
• M4: from 16 GB
• M4 Pro: from 24 GB
• M4 Max: from 36 GB
• M5: from 16 GB
• M5 Pro: from 24 GB
• M5 Max: from 36 GB

Graphics cards

Runs well on: RTX 3060 12GB, RTX 3070, RTX 3080 10GB, RTX 3090, RTX 4060, RTX 4060 Ti 16GB, RTX 4070 / 4070 Super, RTX 4070 Ti Super, RTX 4080 / 4080 Super, RTX 4090, RTX 5060, RTX 5060 Ti 16GB, RTX 5070, RTX 5070 Ti, RTX 5080, RTX 5090, Radeon RX 7800 XT, Radeon RX 9070 XT, Radeon RX 7900 XTX.

Hardware to run it

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• Smallest Mac: M3 with 8 GB. See it on Amazon
• Smallest graphics card: RTX 4060 (8 GB). See it on Amazon
• Storage: image, video and voice models are large, and most people end up keeping several. A fast external SSD keeps your main drive free. See SSDs on Amazon

Lighter and heavier alternatives

• Kokoro TTS: needs about 2 GB, a lighter choice. Natural text to speech from a tiny 82M model.
• Qwen3 TTS 1.7B: needs about 8 GB, a heavier choice. Clone a voice from a short sample. Very natural.
• ACE-Step 1.5: needs about 12 GB, a heavier choice. Makes full songs with vocals from lyrics.

Questions