I see a lot of whisper stuff out there. Are these the same old OpenAI whispers or have they been updated heavily?

I've been using parakeet v3 which is fantastic (and tiny). Confused why we're still seeing whisper out there, there's been a lot of development.

Whisper is still old reliable - I find that it's less prone to hallucinations than newer models, easier to run (on AMD GPU, via whisper.cpp), and only ~2x slower than parakeet. I even bothered to "port" Parakeet to Nemo-less pytorch to run it on my GPU, and still went back to Whisper after a couple of days.

Whisper is very good in many languages.

It's also in many flavours, from tiny to turbo, and so can fit many system profiles.

That's what makes it unique and hard to replace.

same, even have kokoro for speech back to text for home assistant and parakeet on mac os through voice ink.

Also vibe coded a way to use parakeet from the same parakeet piper server on my grapheneos phone https://zach.codes/p/vibe-coding-a-wispr-clone-in-20-minutes