- Deployment
- self-hosted-weights
- Hq Country
- United States
- Hq City
- San Francisco
- Ownership
- private
- Founded
- 2022
- Training Default
- never
- Residency Options
- wherever the operator runs it, fully offline operation is the normal case
- Gov Access Exposure
- none-eu
- Eu Ai Act Role
- deployer
- DPA available
- structurally-na
- Zero Retention Available
- Yes
- Self Host Option
- Yes
- Retention Default
- There is no service in the path. The model weights and the reference implementation are released under the MIT licence; audio is transcribed on the operator's own machine and nothing is transmitted. Retention is whatever the operator's own storage policy is.
- Retention Exceptions
- Whisper is a model, not a product: it has no meeting bot, no calendar integration, no sharing and no support contract. A team adopting it is taking on the integration work that Otter or Fireflies sells. Production deployments generally use a reimplementation such as faster-whisper (CTranslate2) rather than the reference repository, which changes the maintenance question but not the data path.
- Subprocessors
- none — nothing leaves the operator's infrastructure
- Subprocessor Count
- 0
- Transfer Mechanism
- intra-eu
- Eu Procurement Ready
- conditional
- Eu Procurement Reason
- This is the architectural floor of the category and it is here to make the comparison honest: transcription does not require sending a recording to anyone. MIT-licensed weights, an MIT reference implementation, and mature reimplementations mean a meeting can be transcribed on a laptop or on a rack in the customer's own building, with no vendor in the path to disclose, no sub-processor to audit and no training question to ask. Every hosted row in this batch is paying for the product built on top of that: the bot that joins the call, the calendar integration, the summaries, the search, the support contract. The condition is that a buyer must supply all of it themselves. The score measures the data path and the data path here is unbeatable; it does not measure that you have just taken on an engineering project.
- Training Claim Basis
- inferred
- Training Confidence
- high
- Residency Claim Basis
- inferred
- Residency Confidence
- high
- Retention Claim Basis
- inferred
- Retention Confidence
- high
- Subprocessors Claim Basis
- inferred
- Subprocessors Confidence
- high
- Residency Class
- customer-controlled
- Portability / Exit Path
- open-weights-permissive
- Subprocessor Jurisdiction
- structurally-none
- Underlying model providers
- none — MIT-licensed weights run on the operator's own hardware
