Qwen3 ASR seems to outperform Whisper in almost every aspect. It feels like there is little reason to keep using Whisper anymore.

Recently, I tested Whisper Large Turbo, Voxtral Mini 3B, and Qwen3 ASR 1.7B for both real-time transcription and offline transcription. As a result, Qwen3 ASR clearly showed much better speed and accuracy than the others. The results might be different with the Voxtral 24B model, but compared to Voxtral Mini 3B, Voxtral Mini Realtime 4B, and Whisper Large Turbo, Qwen3 ASR was definitely better. Even for real-time transcription, it performed very well without needing vLLM.