Free
Added on Nov 12,2026
Earlybird is a small, on-device streaming speech-to-text model that predicts each word before the speaker finishes saying it, along with a confidence score for every word.
It has 29M parameters and is quantised to 4 bits, giving a 16.8 MB model file. It runs about twice as fast as real time on a single CPU thread.
On audiobook speech, a typical word is predicted correctly about 90 ms before it ends, while the released streaming models it was compared with output the word 90 to 400 ms after it ends. That head start is aimed at voice agents that can begin a search, fetch a record or plan a reply while the speaker is still talking.
Key features include word-level confidence taken from raw token probabilities, a guess of the next two words, and calibration where words held at 90 percent confidence or more are right 91 to 96 percent of the time.
The write-up includes benchmarks against Moonshine Tiny, Whistle and Whisper base on audiobooks, TED talks, public speech, earnings calls and synthetic speech, plus a live demo where you can talk to the model in English.
It is built on Moonshine Tiny, with a reduced English vocabulary, training on cut-off audio, padding frames and quantisation-aware training. The author notes limits, including lower accuracy than Whisper base in noisy audio and more word rewrites.
Pricing: free, with open weights on Hugging Face, code on GitHub and a paper on arXiv.
It is suited to developers and researchers building voice agents, voice commands and low-latency on-device transcription.
Popular alternatives to Earlybird include Easymeety.ai, Voice to Text and Otter.ai. Compare their pricing and what each is best for below.
| Tool | Pricing | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Easymeety.ai | Free | Sales reps, managers, researchers and students who record calls, standups, interviews or lectures on iPhone and want ins... |
| Voice to Text | Free | Students, writers and office workers who would rather dictate drafts than type them, in English or another supported lan... |
| Otter.ai | Freemium | Teams and professionals who want meetings transcribed and summarised with action items captured automatically. |
| RecCloud | Paid | Video creators and language learners who need transcripts, subtitles and translated voiceovers for web video. |
| Free Subtitles AI | Freemium | Video creators and editors who need time-stamped subtitles and translations for their footage without typing them out. |
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