All these all just Whisper wrappers? I don't get it, the underlying model still isn't as good as paid custom models from companies, is there an actual open source / weights alternative to Whisper for speech to text? I know only of Parakeet.

Voxtral mini is a bit bigger but their mixed language demos looked super impressive https://mistral.ai/news/voxtral

We like Whisper because it's open-source :) but we also support OpenAI 4o-transcribe/ElevenLabs/Deepgram APIs that all use non-Whisper models (presumedly) under the hood. Speaches also supports other models that are not Whisper. Hopefully adding Parakeet support later too!