Transcribe audio files with OpenAI’s Whisper

Transcription of audio files with OpenAI’s Whisper

Photo by Will Francis on Unsplash.

OpenAI recently open-sourced a neural network called Whisper. It allows you to transcribe (large) audio files like mp3 offline. OpenAI claims Whisper approaches human-level robustness and accuracy in English speech recognition.

Since there are already existing (open-source) models or packages like Vosk or NVIDIA NeMo out there, I was wondering how well Whisper can transcribe audio files.

This article shows you how to make use of Whisper and compares its performance with Vosk, another offline open-source speech recognition toolkit.

tl;dr

• Whisper is an open-source, multilingual, general-purpose speech recognition model by OpenAI.
• It needs only three lines of code to transcribe an (mp3) audio file.
• A quick comparison with Vosk (another open-source toolkit) has shown that Whisper transcribes the audio of a podcast excerpt slightly better. The main difference is that Whisper offers punctuation. This makes the transcription easier to understand.
• Scroll down to “Whisper” or click here (Gist) if you are interested in the code only.

Prerequisites