Let us explain to you WhisperOpenAI’s artificial intelligence system for transcribed audio files into text. There are many tools to transcribe audio to text, but most of them tend to fail. However, this AI, whose v3 version has just been presented, has arrived to offer the best results.
Let’s start this article by explaining, in a simple way, what Whisper is and how it works inside. And then, we’ll end by telling you two ways to use it freely to transcribe your texts.
What is Whisper?
Whisper is a technology that uses artificial intelligence to transcribe audio. This means that you upload an audio file to their system, and this technology analyzes everything that is said in the audio and writes it down for you in words so you don’t have to.
There are jobs like journalism where multiple colleagues are required to transcribe interviews. It is usually a tedious task where you listen to the audio and write down everything that is said, having to stop from time to time and invest a large amount of time, but there is strength in it. With this tool, the transcription is done by an AI.
In this case, most of the classic free tools tend to make a lot of errors, such as confusing words or incorrect placement of others, or even inventing numbers or not including expressions. This means you have to study everything, and it doesn’t save much time either.
And what OpenAI proposes is a more reliable tool to make your transcriptions. It is not free to have certain errors from time to time, but it is much more efficient than most of them; it is fast and very effective. And what’s more, it’s available for free.
How Whisper works
Whisper, now in its third version, is an automatic speech recognition system, or ASR. This is a technology that uses artificial intelligence to process an audio file that you send, analyze the content, identify all the words that they say, and then write to you in text what is said in the audio.
To achieve this, in its third version, this artificial intelligence was trained with over a million hours of audio, which has more than 680,000 hours of use in its second version. With this, errors are reduced by 10 to 20 percent.
Currently, Whisper has an error rate of less than 5% when transcribing from Spanish, something that makes it one of the best tools to do this. You can also transcribe English and other languages, and more Find out when you switch from one language to another during an audio conversation.
Among its advantages is the fact that it can translate correctly even when the conversation stops, using this understanding of putting commas and periods properly depending on the duration of the pause.
Whisper is a language model, a foundation upon which applications and resources can be built. Quickly, a company can create a website and connect it to this model through its API to create a transcription tool or a translator.
For this, Whisper is available in different sizes, so it can be included in different types of applications depending on your needs. You have gone from a version that requires less than 1 GB of VRAM and is trained with 39 million parameters to the largest model, which has 1.55 billion parameters and requires about 10 GB of VRAM.
How to use Whisper
Whisper is an open-source AI and has a Github page with technical instructions on how to download and run it. It requires relatively advanced knowledge and cannot be used by users with little experience.
Alternatively, you can use Whisper at replicate.com/openai/whisper. Whisper is open source, meaning it can be downloaded and used on web pages. And Replicate is a portal where you can use various artificial intelligence models, including Whisper.
On this website, you can upload the audio file you want and choose the model you want to use. For example, you can use the v3 model in any of its versions. You can use it freely with your files, although for advanced use, you need to register.
