I think a lot of people have heard of OpenAI’s local-friendly Whisper model, but I don’t see enough self-hosters talking about WhisperX, so I’ll hop on the soapbox:

Whisper is extremely good when you have lots of audio with one person talking, but fails hard in a conversational setting with people talking over each other. It’s also hard to sync up transcripts with the original audio.

Enter WhisperX: WhisperX is an improved whisper implementation that automatically tags who is talking, and tags each line of speech with a timestamp.

I’ve found it great for DMing TTRPGs — simply record your session with a conference mic, run a transcript with WhisperX, and pass the output to a long-context LLM for easy session summaries. It’s a great way to avoid slowing down the game by taking notes on minor events and NPCs.

I’ve also used it in a hacky script pipeline to bulk download podcast episodes with yt-dlp, create searchable transcripts, and scrub ads by having an LLM sniff out timestamps to cut with ffmpeg.

Privacy-friendly, modest hardware requirements, and good at what it does. WhisperX, apply directly to the forehead.

  • Optional@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    16
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    16 hours ago

    I’ve also used it in a hacky script pipeline to bulk download podcast episodes with yt-dlp, create searchable transcripts, and scrub ads by having an LLM sniff out timestamps to cut with ffmpeg.

    This is genius. Could you appify this and I’ll pay you in real or pretend currency as you prefer

    I’ve found it great for DMing TTRPGs — simply record your session with a conference mic, run a transcript with WhisperX, and pass the output to a long-context LLM for easy session summaries. It’s a great way to avoid slowing down the game by taking notes on minor events and NPCs.

    Okay that’s just crazy. ;)

    • Justin@lemmy.jlh.name
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      edit-2
      14 hours ago

      Probably not that hard to build a simple flask frontend around it.

      Automatically processing files in an S3/WebDAV directory would also be useful.

  • irmadlad@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    6
    ·
    16 hours ago

    What would be some use cases for WhisperX? I’m struggling to envision how I would use that in a selfhosting/homelabbing environment.

    • fatalicus@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      5 hours ago

      I’m personally looking at setting up whisper or whisperx with bazarr, to get subtitles for movies and series that I can’t find any to download.

    • TheFogan@programming.dev
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      11
      ·
      edit-2
      16 hours ago

      half sarcastic but the overall premise of rigging something in to a local voice assistant, when an arguement starts “Ok nabu record this conversation”. then 2 weeks later on another arguement… “OK nabu search our last arguement for the cabinet”. Would be like having a court transcriber on call.

      • irmadlad@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        14 hours ago

        I have a lady friend that does quite a good enough job of that. LOL

        ‘You remember back in 1979…it was a Friday at 2:11 PM, and you said…’ ‘Babe, I don’t remember what I had for breakfast yesterday.’

          • irmadlad@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            13 hours ago

            What kind of stupid-ass question is that? LOL All kidding aside, she’s a good soul. We’re not married, we’ve just know each other for 45+ years. It just kind of clicked. She lives in her house, and I in mine, and we get together as often as possible.

      • hendrik@palaver.p3x.de
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        16 hours ago

        Hmm… Would be interesting to find out what kind of effect that has on the average marriage or relationship 😅

        • TheFogan@programming.dev
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          12 hours ago

          I mean, I’d imagine probably not a good one :) Somehow I imagine asking the AI to record a conversation, is an instant arguement escalator… as is asking to read the facts back, and usually the topic would be switched rather than one side admitting their fault in the conversation.

          Actually I think there’s a black mirror episode on roughly that (not a device for recording audio when asked, but everyone having a chip in their head that automatically records their memories, and a huge fight when a husband discovers his wife deleted a few hours of recordings.

      • irmadlad@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        14 hours ago

        I guess that’s why I am having difficulty coming up with a use case. I mean, I walk around the lab talking to myself all day long, but I think it’d be a bad idea to have a record of all those conversations. lol

        • onslaught545@lemmy.zip
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          14 hours ago

          If you don’t have to sit through a bunch of ‘meetings that could have been emails’ on a daily basis, you likely won’t have a use case for it.

          But in my last job I was a systems engineer for a web development company. I had to be included on all of the dev calls in case an infrastructure question came up that I needed to answer, and so I was vaguely aware of what the devs were doing.

          This software would have been a lifesaver, because my ADHD doesn’t let me listen to stuff like that for a straight hour or two.

  • wise_pancake@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    16 hours ago

    That is cool! I’ve been wanting I’ve wanted to use a model like this but haven’t really looked.

    Are you self hosting the long context llm, of do what are you using?

    Context lengths are what kill a lot of my local llm experiments.

    • dgdft@lemmy.worldOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      9 hours ago

      Are you self hosting the long context llm, of do what are you using?

      I did a lot of my exploration back when GPT4 128K over API was the only long-context game in town.

      I imagine the options are much better these days between Llama 3/4, Deepseek, and Qwen — but haven’t tried them locally myself.