Whisper

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Whisper is a general-purpose speech recognition model. It is trained on a large dataset of diverse audio and is also a multi-task model that can perform multilingual speech recognition as well as speech translation and language identification.

Approach

A Transformer sequence-to-sequence model is trained on various speech processing tasks, including multilingual speech recognition, speech translation, spoken language identification, and voice activity detection. All of these tasks are jointly represented as a sequence of tokens to be predicted by the decoder, allowing for a single model to replace many different stages of a traditional speech processing pipeline. The multitask training format uses a set of special tokens that serve as task specifiers or classification targets.

Setup

We used Python 3.9.9 and PyTorch 1.10.1 to train and test our models, but the codebase is expected to be compatible with Python 3.7 or later and recent PyTorch versions. The codebase also depends on a few Python packages, most notably HuggingFace Transformers for their fast tokenizer implementation and ffmpeg-python for reading audio files. The following command will pull and install the latest commit from this repository, along with its Python dependencies

pip install git+https://github.com/openai/whisper.git 

It also requires the command-line tool ffmpeg to be installed on your system, which is available from most package managers:

# on Ubuntu or Debian
sudo apt update && sudo apt install ffmpeg

# on MacOS using Homebrew (https://brew.sh/)
brew install ffmpeg                         

# on Windows using Chocolatey (https://chocolatey.org/)
choco install ffmpeg

Command-line usage

The following command will transcribe speech in audio files

whisper audio.flac audio.mp3 audio.wav

The default setting works well for transcribing English. To transcribe an audio file containing non-English speech, you can specify the language using the --language option:

whisper ~/japanese.wav --language Japanese

Adding --task translate will translate the speech into English:

whisper ~/japanese.wav --language Japanese --task translate

Run the following to view all available transcription options:

whisper --help

See tokenizer.py for the list of all available languages.

Python usage

Transcription can also be performed within Python:

import whisper

model = whisper.load_model("base")
result = model.transcribe("audio.mp3")
print(result["text"])

Internally, the transcribe() method reads the entire file and processes the audio with a sliding 30-second window, performing autoregressive sequence-to-sequence predictions on each window.

Below is an example usage of whisper.detect_language() and whisper.decode() which provide lower-level access to the model.

import whisper

model = whisper.load_model("base")

# load audio and pad/trim it to fit 30 seconds
audio = whisper.load_audio("audio.mp3")
audio = whisper.pad_or_trim(audio)

# make log-Mel spectrogram and move to the same device as the model
mel = whisper.log_mel_spectrogram(audio).to(model.device)

# detect the spoken language
_, probs = model.detect_language(mel)
print(f"Detected language: {max(probs, key=probs.get)}")

# decode the audio
options = whisper.DecodingOptions()
result = whisper.decode(model, mel, options)

# print the recognized text
print(result.text)

License

The code and the model weights of Whisper are released under the MIT License. See LICENSE for further details.