HuggingFace LightEval

by Hugging Face

Eval harness — includes WER evaluations for ASR.

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TL;DR

Best for benchmarking Whisper / Canary / Parakeet on standard corpora. Pricing: free.

Category
Open source
License
MIT
Stars
★ 2.5k
Last push
2026-06-29
Pricing
free
Platforms
Linux, macOS

What it is

A lightweight benchmark harness covering many open-source ASR models. MIT.

Best for: Benchmarking Whisper / Canary / Parakeet on standard corpora.
Watch out for: Newer than alternatives; coverage growing.

Install / use

pip install lighteval

Features

Speaker diarizationNo
Word-level timestampsYes
Streaming / real-timeNo
Languages supported99
HIPAA eligibleNo

Links

GitHub repo ↗

HuggingFace LightEval vs Whipscribe

FeatureHuggingFace LightEvalWhipscribe
CategoryOpen sourceTranscription APIs
Pricingfree$4–$24 one-time packs (credits never expire) · $2 single unlock · 60 min free on signup
Speaker diarizationNoYes
Word timestampsYesYes
StreamingNoNo
Languages9999
PlatformsLinux, macOSWeb, API, MCP

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