Whisper

Overview

Transcribe audio with OpenAI's Whisper, an open-source multilingual speech recognition model. This skill covers local Whisper (openai-whisper 20250625), faster-whisper 1.2.1 (CTranslate2, up to 4x faster), whisper.cpp (C++, CPU-friendly) and the OpenAI API, where whisper-1 is the Whisper model and newer gpt-transcribe models are the default recommendation for plain transcripts. Includes subtitle generation (SRT/VTT/JSON), multi-language transcription, translation to English, speaker diarization, word-level timestamps, and production pipeline patterns for podcasts, meetings, and video subtitles.

Instructions

Step 1: Choose Your Runtime

Option A — OpenAI Whisper (original Python):

pip install openai-whisper
# Models: tiny (39M), base (74M), small (244M), medium (769M), large-v3 (1.5G), turbo (809M)
# CLI: whisper episode.mp3 --model turbo --output_format srt

Needs ffmpeg on the PATH. The default turbo model is not trained for translation: use medium or large for --task translate.