Insanely Fast Whisper

Powered by 🤗 Transformers, Optimum & flash-attn

TL;DR - Transcribe 300 minutes (5 hours) of audio in less than 5 minutes - with OpenAI's Whisper Large v2. Blazingly fast transcription is now a reality!⚡️

Not convinced? Here are some benchmarks we ran on a free Google Colab T4 GPU! 👇

🆕 You can now access blazingly fast transcriptions via your terminal! ⚡️

We've added a CLI to enable fast transcriptions. Here's how you can use it:

Transcribe your audio

Install insanely-fast-whisper with pipx:

pipx install insanely-fast-whisper

Run inference from any path on your computer:

insanely-fast-whisper --file-name <filename or URL>

Don't want to install? Just use pipx run:

pipx run insanely-fast-whisper --file-name <filename or URL>

Note: The CLI is opinionated and currently only works for Nvidia GPUs. Make sure to check out the defaults and the list of options you can play around with to maximise your transcription throughput. Run insanely-fast-whisper --help or pipx run insanely-fast-whisper --help to get all the CLI arguments and defaults.

How to use it without a CLI?

For older GPUs, all you need to run is:

import torch
from transformers import pipeline

pipe = pipeline("automatic-speech-recognition",
                "openai/whisper-large-v2",
                torch_dtype=torch.float16,
                device="cuda:0")

pipe.model = pipe.model.to_bettertransformer()

outputs = pipe("<FILE_NAME>",
               chunk_length_s=30,
               batch_size=24,
               return_timestamps=True)

outputs["text"]

For newer (A10, A100, H100s), use Flash Attention:

import torch
from transformers import pipeline

pipe = pipeline("automatic-speech-recognition",
                "openai/whisper-large-v2",
                torch_dtype=torch.float16,
                model_kwargs={"use_flash_attention_2": True},
                device="cuda:0")

outputs = pipe("<FILE_NAME>",
               chunk_length_s=30,
               batch_size=24,
               return_timestamps=True)

outputs["text"]                

Roadmap

• Add benchmarks for Whisper.cpp
• Add benchmarks for 4-bit inference
• Add a light CLI script
• Deployment script with Inference API

Community showcase

@ochen1 created a brilliant MVP for a CLI here: https://github.com/ochen1/insanely-fast-whisper-cli (Try it out now!)