Comparative Analysis of Energy Consumption and Carbon Footprint in Automatic Speech Recognition Systems: A Case Study Comparing Whisper and Google Speech-to-Text

Abstract

This study investigates the energy consumption and carbon footprint of two prominent automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems: OpenAI’s Whisper and Google’s Speech-to-Text API. We evaluate both local and cloud-based speech recognition approaches using a public Kaggle dataset of 20,000 short audio clips in Urdu, utilizing CodeCarbon, PyJoule, and PowerAPI for comprehensive energy profiling. As a result of our analysis, we expose some substantial differences between the two systems in terms of energy efficiency and carbon emissions, with the cloud-based solution showing substantially lower environmental impact despite comparable accuracy. We discuss the implications of these findings for sustainable AI deployment and minimizing the ecological footprint of speech recognition technologies.