Official documentation

Distil-Whisper README

Hugging Face, GitHub (huggingface/distil-whisper), n.d.

Read on October 17, 2026

What it is: The README of Distil-Whisper, Hugging Face's distilled version of OpenAI's Whisper. It gives the speed and size claims and states that the project is MIT licensed.
How much weight it carries: Official repository, so it is authoritative for the license. The speed and size figures are the project's own comparison against Whisper, not an independent benchmark. The guide repeats them as claims, not as measured results.

Facts taken from this source

The Distil-Whisper project says its distilled model is 6x faster and 50% smaller than Whisper, within 1% word error rate.
“Distilled variant of Whisper for speech recognition. 6x faster, 50% smaller, within 1% word error rate” (Repository description)
Distil-Whisper, Hugging Face's distilled version of Whisper, is MIT licensed, so it can be used for commercial applications.
“Permissive license: Distil-Whisper is MIT licensed , meaning it can be used for commercial applications.” (README, licensing section)