whisper-small-it

Fine-tuned openai/whisper-small (244M params) for Italian ASR.

Author: Ettore Di Giacinto

Brought to you by the LocalAI team. This model can be used directly with LocalAI.

Usage with LocalAI

This model is ready to use with LocalAI via the whisperx backend.

Save the following as whisperx-small-it.yaml in your LocalAI models directory:

name: whisperx-small-it
backend: whisperx
known_usecases:
  - transcript
parameters:
  model: LocalAI-io/whisper-small-it-ct2-int8
  language: it

Then transcribe audio via the OpenAI-compatible endpoint:

curl http://localhost:8080/v1/audio/transcriptions \
  -H "Content-Type: multipart/form-data" \
  -F file="@audio.mp3" \
  -F model="whisperx-small-it"

Results

Evaluated on Common Voice 25.0 Italian test set (15,184 samples):

Step	WER
1000	18.36%
3000	15.45%
5000	14.58%
7000	13.61%
10000	13.0%

Training Details

• Base model: openai/whisper-small (244M parameters)
• Dataset: Common Voice 25.0 Italian (173k train, 15k dev, 15k test)
• Steps: 10,000
• Precision: bf16 on NVIDIA GB10

Usage

Transformers

from transformers import pipeline

pipe = pipeline("automatic-speech-recognition", model="LocalAI-io/whisper-small-it")
result = pipe("audio.mp3", generate_kwargs={"language": "it", "task": "transcribe"})
print(result["text"])

CTranslate2 / faster-whisper

For optimized CPU inference: LocalAI-io/whisper-small-it-ct2-int8

Links

• Multi-dataset version: LocalAI-io/whisper-small-it-multi (WER 15.6%)
• CTranslate2 INT8: LocalAI-io/whisper-small-it-ct2-int8
• Code: github.com/localai-org/italian-whisper
• LocalAI: github.com/mudler/LocalAI