Whistle launches with CPU speech-to-text in a 16.9MB file

Cactus Compute released Whistle, a 16.9MB speech-to-text file that runs on CPUs in the same engine as Needle. The company says it mostly beats Whisper base with 9x less file size and 6x speed, and supports English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Polish. A user who tried it called it “incredibly capable” and marveled that it fits in about 17MB.