asears / whisper_mic

Project that allows one to use a microphone with OpenAI whisper.

Whisper Mic

This repo is based on the work done here by OpenAI. This repo allows you use use a mic as demo. This repo copies some of the README from original project.

Video Tutorial

See the video tutorial for this repo here

Setup

1. Create a venv of your choice.
2. Run pip install -r requirements.txt

Available models and languages

There are five model sizes, four with English-only versions, offering speed and accuracy tradeoffs. Below are the names of the available models and their approximate memory requirements and relative speed.

Size	Parameters	English-only model	Multilingual model	Required VRAM	Relative speed
tiny	39 M	tiny.en	tiny	~1 GB	~32x
base	74 M	base.en	base	~1 GB	~16x
small	244 M	small.en	small	~2 GB	~6x
medium	769 M	medium.en	medium	~5 GB	~2x
large	1550 M	N/A	large	~10 GB	1x

For English-only applications, the .en models tend to perform better, especially for the tiny.en and base.en models. We observed that the difference becomes less significant for the small.en and medium.en models.

Microphone Demo

You can use the model with a microphone using the mic.py program. Use -h to see flag options.

Some of the more important flags are the --model and --english flags.

Troubleshooting

If you are having issues with the mic.py not running try the following:

sudo apt install portaudio19-dev python3-pyaudio

License

The code and the model weights of Whisper are released under the MIT License. See their repo for more information.

The code under this repo is under the AGPL license. See LICENSE for further details.

Thanks

Until recently, access to high performing speech to text models was only available through paid serviecs. With this release, I am excited for the many applications that will come.