Simple and basic python function for transcribing audio in realtime based on faster-whisper

This tiny script showcases how easy it is to transcribe audio in realtime (or even faster).

Someday I came across this video: https://youtu.be/Mfbei9I8qQc?feature=shared (btw. a nice channel) when I was looking for a starting point regarding state-of-the-art SpeechToText (STT).

The solution was "faster-whisper": "a reimplementation of OpenAI's Whisper model using CTranslate2, which is a fast inference engine for Transformer models" /1/

For the setup and required hardware / software see /1/

After setting up, feel free to use the code provided in the repo.

Beware: models can use some diskspace, so keep an eye on your system-stats!

important: set your device in line 55/56 (uncomment/comment) and set the correct path in line 56 (ger) or 57 (eng) and choose the target language by commenting/uncommenting one of these lines

After importing necessary libs, of course, we

1. initialize the time-module for time-measurement

2. init the model (Tiny-Whisper, see /2/);

3. feed an audio file (.wav) in "model.transcribe() as well as giving the target language and other inputs (for german you can check e.g. [https://www.lightbulblanguages.co.uk/resources-ge-sound-files.htm])

4. print the transcript and processing-time in terminal-output

important: tested under Win11; Python3.11.5; pip24.0

hardware and setup

CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 7950X GPU: NVIDIA RTX 4090 RAM: 64GB nvcc: NVIDIA (R) Cuda compiler driver Copyright (c) 2005-2023 NVIDIA Corporation Built on Wed_Nov_22_10:30:42_Pacific_Standard_Time_2023 Cuda compilation tools, release 12.3, V12.3.107 Build cuda_12.3.r12.3/compiler.33567101_0

• read https://github.com/SYSTRAN/faster-whisper?tab=readme-ov-file#requirements /1/

• create a venv (Win11, e.g.: python -m venv stt-venv)

• activate venv (Win11: stt-venv/Scripts/activate)

• pip install -r requirements.txt

• run python stt.py

• have fun and feel free to share your use-cases :)

• feel free to add functionality
• I use it for a STT-LLM-TTS pipeline based on "faster-whisper" (STT), Ollama & API (LLM, Mistral 7b), suno-bark (TTS)

• https://github.com/SYSTRAN/faster-whisper /1/
• https://huggingface.co/openai/whisper-tiny /2/