> I’ve been looking into locally hosting a transcription API server

I've been hosting my own since whisper.cpp appeared on the scene, thrown up on a server with a 3090ti. Even if there is better/faster stuff out today, it just keeps on working without any issues, the weights are tiny and it's faster than I could need. This is basically what you need to get this working today:

    MODEL="/home/user/projects/ggml-org/whisper.cpp/models/ggml-large-v3-turbo.bin"
    WHISPER_SERVER_BIN="/home/user/projects/ggml-org/whisper.cpp/build/bin/whisper-server"
    "$WHISPER_SERVER_BIN" --model "$MODEL" --language en --host 127.0.0.1 --port 7812

Very simple stuff, throw it on some local homelab server and now you have a local transcription API :) Might need to play around with some of the inference parameters, but once you've locked them in, seems to work really well.