You may have noticed that I’m obsessed with open source speech recognition, so I was very excited when OpenAI released a new voice model. I’m even more excited now I’ve had a chance to play with it, the accuracy is extremely impressive, especially as it’s multi-language. OpenAI have done a great job packaging it, you can install it straight from pip if you’re a Linux shell user, but I wanted to find a way to let anybody try it for themselves from a web browser, even if they’re not developers. I love Google’s Colab service, and luckily somebody had already created a notebook showing the basics of using the Whisper model. I added some documentation and test files, and now you can give it a try for yourself by opening this Colab link – https://colab.research.google.com/github/petewarden/openai-whisper-webapp/blob/main/OpenAI_Whisper_ASR_Demo.ipynb.

Follow the directions, and after a minute or so you’ll see a button at the bottom of the page where you can record your own audio, and see a transcript. Give it a try, I think you’ll be impressed too!