Cactus Releases Whistle: A 16.9MB Speech-to-Text Model

Cactus Compute released Whistle, an open-weights ASR model with 55M params (36M active) that compresses to a 16.9MB CQ2bit file and supports seven languages across 17 platforms. It scores 4.31 WER on LibriSpeech test-clean versus 4.9 for Whisper base at 145.3MB, targeting budget phones and wearables.

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