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Whisper – open source speech recognition by OpenAI

openai.com

21–30 of 508 posts

Re: Whisper – open source speech recognition by OpenAI

#21

Is there a list of system requirements somewhere ? Can it run on cheaper low memory GPUs ? maybe CPUs ?

Their models range from 70mb to 3gb. The largest model is smaller than the optimised stable diffusion. Not sure what the inference speed is like, haven't tried it myself yet.

I just tested it myself. Its fast enough on colab, couple of seconds but not sure if its fast enough to transcribe realtime audio yet.

Re: Whisper – open source speech recognition by OpenAI

#22
> About a third of Whisper’s audio dataset is non-English, and it is alternately given the task of transcribing in the original language or translating to English. We find this approach is particularly effective at learning speech to text translation and outperforms the supervised SOTA on CoVoST2 to English translation zero-shot.

That's intriguing. You can just set the model to transcribe everything into English, no matter which language the speaker is using, and it just works. Given that many people are much better at understanding English than at speaking it, this might make voice interfaces much more accessible without much work.

Re: Whisper – open source speech recognition by OpenAI

#23

I'm not in the Speech Recognition circles and am looking for open source speech recognition I can play around with - would this be the new state of the art?

For me as a deaf person the current state of art (in terms of speed & usability) is the Recorder app on a Google Pixel phone (4a/6 Pro is what I've used)

Re: Whisper – open source speech recognition by OpenAI

#25
Naively, training the same model on multiple languages has interesting implications.

On one hand, it may capture something "deeper" about language.

On the other hand, it's likely to do great in general, but miss particularities of some language.

Understanding the coverage of the training model seems a perennial problem. Is there any (shorthand) way to compare language model training corpora?

Clearly if they use common subsets we have a literal comparison. I'm more interested in whether there's progress in characterizing corpora by speech styles, fluency, vocabulary sets, (noise) environment, emotionality, proposition types, etc.

(btw: 25 minutes for a 9-minute segment on a 12-thread x86. Lots of jargon spelled as it sounds. Sentences capitalized but no punctuation. Overall good.)

Re: Whisper – open source speech recognition by OpenAI

#26
How is it Apple, Google, or Microsoft are not further ahead of the game on speech recognition like this? They have the resources to hire the best ML researchers and throw tons of computing hours at it, yet Siri, Google, and Cortana continue to struggle to get anywhere near this level of comprehension.

Re: Whisper – open source speech recognition by OpenAI

#27
Hold on, it does not only speech recognition, but also language translation, in the same model?

What an interesting approach. What benefits does this have over having two dedicated models, one for speech-to-text, and another for translation?

It just seems so odd, given the problems of speech-to-text and Spanish-to-English seems so different from one another (in terms of the problem domain). Seems so unusual to have both handled by one model!

Does knowledge of speech-to-text carry over into knowledge of translation? Does knowledge of translation carry over into knowledge of speech-to-text? So weird.

Re: Whisper – open source speech recognition by OpenAI

#29
post #5

Neat, https://github.com/openai/whisper - they have open-sourced it, even the model weights, so they are living up to their name in this instance. The 4 examples are stunningly good (the examples have speakers with heavy accents, speaking in foreign language, speaking with dynamic background noise, etc.), this is far and away better than anything else I've seen. Will be super curious to see other folks trying it out…

The French version is a little contrived. The speaker is a native speaker, but the text is obviously the result of a translation from English to French, not idiomatic French.

I will try to put the code to the test, see how it goes.

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