Whisper

Whisper is OpenAI's open-source speech-recognition model, released under the MIT licence and runnable on your own machine in sizes from tiny to large. It is the default inside dozens of transcription apps, the engine behind many "supports 90 languages" claims, and the baseline every Arabic benchmark compares against. OpenAI also sells hosted versions through its API at a few tenths of a cent per minute. Arabic is one language code with no dialect handling, and the independent record is unambiguous. A University of British Columbia study found the large model reached a word error rate above 100% on Emirati speech without fine-tuning; the Saudi-built Open Universal Arabic ASR Leaderboard puts the largest model at around 30% averaged across Arabic test sets, and 56% on the Saudi SADA dataset. Use it for Modern Standard Arabic or as a free starting point; for Gulf dialect, use a model trained on it.