whisper alternatives lately

[llmtrack]

Posting this in case it saves someone else a little time.

If you were starting from scratch today for this use case, what would you choose first and what would you ignore?

Simple and boring is a valid answer.

My use case is pretty ordinary: local chat, some document work, and occasional batch jobs.

[cudascope]

I'd approach it in a boring order. If you're on TensorRT-LLM, I'd confirm the version first and then reduce variables until the behavior is obvious. Not glamorous advice, but repeatable baselines save a lot of time.