Whether, why, and how to use Whisper to transcribe speech

[brainwane]

Whisper, from OpenAI, is an open source speech recognition tool that also does translation. You can try it right now at https://replicate.com/openai/whisper or install it on your own computer to run privately. You provide an audio file, and it emits a text transcript as well as .srt and .vtt subtitle files.

This is a really useful (and free!) tool. I have started using it regularly to make transcripts and captions/subtitles, and I just wrote a blog post to share how, and why -- plus my reflections on the ethics of using it and similar tools trained using machine learning.

Note that it works on existing files, but does not work for live-transcribing an event as it's happening.