Whistle speech model: Apache 2.0, 16.9 MB, offline or Sume STT?

Yes, Whistle can ship inside an app: its Hugging Face model card lists the license as Apache 2.0, the model as one 16.9 MB file, and the runtime as needing no dependencies and no GPU. It covers seven languages (English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Polish). If your audio is in another language, or you want a transcript tied to a hosted clip, Sume's video-inspect transcript is the server-side route.

The Whistle facts below come from the model card, read on 2026-10-13. The Sume facts come from the video inspect docs.

What does the Apache 2.0 license change for a product team?

It tells you the model files can be bundled in a product you distribute, under the license terms. This is a statement about the license shown on the card, not legal advice: read the license text and the licenses of any training data or runtime you add before you ship.

A license does not tell you accuracy on your audio. The card publishes word error rate tables measured over 86,174 utterances against Whisper and Moonshine; treat those as a starting point and test your own clips.

When should a clip go to Sume instead?

Send it to Sume when the language is outside the seven, when the clip already lives in the Sume media library, or when the next step is a Sume job such as captions. POST /v1/video-inspect with transcribe: true returns word timings and, with segmentation.mode: "sentence", sentence segments. Without duration_seconds Sume reserves one minute, with a 600 second hint maximum.

A silent clip fails with inspect_source_has_no_audio, so probe has_audio first. The rate card lists the current credits.

curl -X POST https://api.sume.com/v1/video-inspect \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SUME_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: whistle-compare-001" \
  -d '{
    "video_url": "https://media.sume.com/artifacts/artf_demo/clip.mp4",
    "frames": 0,
    "transcribe": true,
    "language_code": "en",
    "duration_seconds": 60
  }'