Whisper is OpenAI's open-source automatic speech recognition system trained on 680,000 hours of multilingual and multitask data from the web, delivering near-human accuracy in transcription and translation across 99 languages. Its robust architecture handles accents, background noise, and technical vocabulary that trip up commercial ASR systems. Developers worldwide integrate Whisper into podcast transcription services, voice assistants, accessibility tools, and real-time meeting transcription — making it the foundational speech model for the majority of AI audio applications.