WhisperLiveKit: Self-Hosted Real-Time Speech-to-Text Guide
A complete guide to WhisperLiveKit, the self-hosted real-time speech-to-text engine with streaming ASR, speaker diarization, live translation, and OpenAI/Deepgram-compatible APIs — 10,900+ GitHub stars and fully private.
🚀 Want to deploy WhisperLiveKit yourself?
Docker configs, system requirements, and installation guides — all on one page.
View WhisperLiveKit Tool Page →Voice is becoming the default interface for AI — but sending every conversation to a cloud API raises latency, privacy, and cost concerns. WhisperLiveKit solves all three by bringing real-time speech-to-text to your own hardware. With over 10,900 GitHub stars, it has quickly become one of the most popular self-hosted transcription engines.
What Makes WhisperLiveKit Different?
Most Whisper-based tools transcribe in batches. WhisperLiveKit streams audio continuously, producing words as they are spoken — typically in under a second. It builds on Faster-Whisper and CTranslate2 to deliver high accuracy without sacrificing speed.
Core Features
| Feature | What It Does |
|---|---|
| 🎙️ Streaming ASR | Real-time transcription with word-level timestamps |
| 👥 Speaker Diarization | Identifies who said what in multi-speaker conversations |
| 🌍 Live Translation | Transcribes and translates across languages on the fly |
| 🔌 Compatible APIs | OpenAI- and Deepgram-compatible REST endpoints |
| 🔒 Fully Local | Audio never leaves your machine — no cloud fees |
Why Go Local?
💡 Privacy: Medical, legal, and enterprise conversations stay on-premises. Cost: no per-minute pricing — pay for hardware once. Latency: no network round-trip between your mic and the model.
Whether you are building a voice assistant, live captioning for meetings, or a multilingual support bot, WhisperLiveKit gives you a production-ready foundation — and the architecture diagram below shows how the streaming pipeline fits together.
Get Started
WhisperLiveKit ships with a Docker image and a ready-to-use compose.yml, so you can be up and running in minutes. Head over to the tool page for system requirements and the exact deployment commands.
🚀 Ready to run WhisperLiveKit?
Get the Docker setup, hardware requirements, and installation guide on the tool page.
Deploy WhisperLiveKit →