TIL the original Whisper is mostly Python and I was also introduced to Sumana Harihareswara
Whisper, from OpenAI, is a new open source tool that “approaches human level robustness and accuracy on English speech recognition”; “Moreover, it enables transcription in multiple languages, as well as translation from those languages into English.” …
Whisper is an open source software tool written mostly in the Python programming language. Instructions on how to download, install, and run it are relatively straightforward, if you are comfortable running commands in a terminal. It depends on Python, a few Python libraries, and Rust. In case you want to try Whisper but you don’t want to fiddle with installing it on your computer, the machine learning company Replicate is hosting a web-based version of Whisper so you can upload a sound file and get a transcription. But of course then you don’t get the privacy benefits of running it entirely on your own machine.
I will definitely be giving this a test drive during my holiday time off.
Meanwhile, Harihareswara seems like quite the interesting individual. I appreciate her thoughtfulness regarding the ethics of using Whisper. Will be adding her blog to my feeds.
Via Simon Willison