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You picked a local model and the download failed, stopped part way, or finished and then wouldn’t install. The error you got narrows it down considerably, so start there.

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What each message means

“Model downloaded but installation failed” is worth retrying immediately. The app is explicit that retrying installs from the file you already have — so it costs seconds, not another full download.

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If it keeps failing

1

Check you have the disk space

Models are large, and a download that dies part way through is usually a full disk. The larger Whisper models in particular need several gigabytes free.
2

Try a smaller model

If a small model downloads and a large one doesn’t, that’s disk space or a connection dropping over a long transfer — not a broken installation.
3

Try a different network

Corporate networks, VPNs and DNS filters block the model hosts more often than they block anything else we use, because the files come from huggingface.co and GitHub rather than from us.
4

Delete the model and start again

In the model picker, delete the partial model, then download it fresh. That clears a corrupted partial file, which retrying alone won’t always fix.

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On a managed network

Model downloads need hosts that cloud transcription doesn’t, so they can fail on a network where everything else works. Your IT team needs:
  • huggingface.co
  • cdn-lfs.huggingface.co, cdn-lfs-us-1.huggingface.co
  • github.com, objects.githubusercontent.com
The full list, with purpose and protocol, is on Network allowlist.

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FAQ

Yes — OpenWhispr Cloud works throughout, so you can keep dictating.
Only for local processing. Cloud transcription needs nothing downloaded. Cloud vs local covers the trade-off.
They’re stored on your machine, and the model picker shows each one’s size before you download it. You can delete any of them from the same place.
That points at the install step failing rather than the download — the file never lands where the app expects it. Send us a debug log; see how.