76 comments

[ 1.2 ms ] story [ 107 ms ] thread
Does this finally enable dynamically generating subtitles for movies with AI?
Shut off the broken bot filter so we can read it please
They don't need to shut off Anubis, they just need to configure it beyond the defaults. If they turned on the meta-refresh based challenge then all browsers could access it while still keeping most of the bots away. But few people ever configure these things and just accept the broken defaults.

With the current broken default config my browser can't even run the JS challenge due to it using unsupported bleeding edge JS features.

I wonder if they'll be satisfied there or add a chunk of others now that they've started. Parakeet is supposed to be good?

Should they add Voice Activity Detection? Are these separate filters or just making the whisper filter more fancy?

Parakeet is indeed really awesome.
Does this have the ability to edit historic words as more info becomes available?

Eg. If I say "I scream", it sounds phonetically identical to "Ice cream".

Yet the transcription of "I scream is the best dessert" makes a lot less sense than "Ice cream is the best dessert".

Doing this seems necessary to have both low latency and high accuracy, and things like transcription on android do that and you can see the adjusting guesses as you talk.

The I is emphasized more in I scream than ice cream I think.

But it’s great point that you need context to be sure.

I've been playing with whisper to try to do local transcription of long videos, but one issue I've found is that long (>15 seconds) spans without any speech tend to send it into a hallucination loops that it often can't recover from. I wonder if, with direct integration into ffmpeg, they will be able to configure it in a way that can improve that situation.
Can whisper do multilingual yet? Last time I tried it on some mixed dutch/english text it would spit out english translations for some of the dutch text. Strange bug/feature since from all appearances it had understood the dutch text perfectly fine.
I have recently found that parakeet from NVIDIA is way faster and pretty much as correct as Whisper, but it only works with English.
Does this mean that any software which uses ffmpeg can now add a transcription option? Audacity, Chrome, OBS etc
Once local transcription is in more places hopefully we can persuade content creator not to burn bouncing sub-titles into their videos.

I've seen professionally produced recordings on dry and technical subjects with good sound quality where they've decided to use distracting sub-titles with no way to disable them.

It seems so unnecessary if you're not making novelty videos about cats.

Also local transcription allows for automatic translation and again overlaying subtitles on top of an existing burnt in set is a really poor reading experience.

Those burned in subtitles still aren’t as cool as theme-matched anime subtitles during intro music sequences from fansubs 15 years ago.

Those are still cool IMO

Not sure it will be packaged in Debian, with an external binary model god knows how it was produced...
I guess that there is no streaming option for sending generated tokens to, say, an LLM service to process the text in real-time.
I know nothing about Whisper, is this usable for automated translation?

I own a couple very old and as far as I'm aware never translated Japanese movies. I don't speak Japanese but I'd love to watch them.

A couple years ago I had been negotiating with a guy on Fiver to translate them. At his usual rate-per-minute of footage it would have cost thousands of dollars but I'd negotiated him down to a couple hundred before he presumably got sick of me and ghosted me.

How could one in theory, use this to train on a new language? Say for a hubby project; I have recordings of some old folks stories in my local dialect.

└── Dey well; Be well

(comment deleted)
I was expecting a lot more comments on if this is a necessary feature or if this even belongs in a library like ffmpeg. I think this is bloat, especially when the feature doesn't work flawless, whisper is very limited.
You'd be surprised what's in there, a few forms of NNs are already supported for denoising, speech detection.

I think having this flow out to all of the deps of libav is a greater good than notions of lib purity.

Whisper is genuinely amazing - with the right nudging. It's the one AI thing that has genuinely turned my life upside-down in an unambiguously good way.

People should check out Subtitle Edit (and throw the dev some money) which is a great interface for experimenting with Whisper transcription. It's basically Aegisub 2.0, if you're old, like me.

HOWTO:

Drop a video or audio file to the right window, then go to Video > Audio to text (Whisper). I get the best results with Faster-Whisper-XXL. Use large-v2 if you can (v3 has some regressions), and you've got an easy transcription and translation workflow. The results aren't perfect, but Subtitle Edit is for cleaning up imperfect transcripts with features like Tools > Fix common errors.

EDIT: Oh, and if you're on the current gen of Nvidia card, you might have to add "--compute_type float32" to make the transcription run correctly. I think the error is about an empty file, output or something like that.

EDIT2: And if you get another error, possibly about whisper.exe, iirc I had to reinstall the Torch libs from a specific index like something along these lines (depending on whether you use pip or uv):

    pip3 install torch torchvision torchaudio --index-url https://download.pytorch.org/whl/cu118

    uv pip install --system torch torchvision torchaudio --index-url https://download.pytorch.org/whl/cu118
If you get the errors and the above fixes work, please type your error message in a reply with what worked to help those who come after. Or at least the web crawlers for those searching for help.

https://www.nikse.dk/subtitleedit

https://www.nikse.dk/donate

https://github.com/SubtitleEdit/subtitleedit/releases

Is there a way to use it to generate a srt subtitle file given a video file?
you can install suing winget or chocolately

    winget install --id=Nikse.SubtitleEdit  -e
You don't happen to know a whisper solution that combines diarization with live audio transcription, do you?
Subtitle Edit is great if you have the hardware to run it. If you don't have GPUs available or don't want to manage the servers I built a simple to use and affordable API that you can use: https://lemonfox.ai/
Subtitle edit is great, and their subtitle library libse was exactly what I needed for a project I did.
I've been using FFmpeg and Whisper to record and transcribe live police scanner audio for my city, and update it in real-time to a live website. It works great, with the expected transcription errors and hallucinations.
Does this whisper also do text-to-speech?
I had a small bash pipeline for doing this until now.

  ffmpeg -f pulse -i "$(pactl get-default-source)" -t 5 -f wav -ar 16000 -ac 1 -c:a pcm_s16le - \
  | ./main - \
  | head -2 \
  | tail -1 \
  | cut -d] -f2 \
  | awk '{$1=$1};1'
The reading from mic part (-f pulse, pactl...) is linux-specific rest of it should be cross platform. The `main` executable is the whisper.cpp executable (see whisper.cpp github readme, it's just the output of `make base.en` from that).

Edit: -t 5 controls recording duration.

Oh and add 2>/dev/null to silence the debug output. I copied this from a pipe that further sends it into an LLM that then looks at the meaning and turns it into a variety of structured data (reminders, todo items, etc) which I then....

I tried to use whisper to generate non-english subs from english audio, but wasnt able to figure out. I know it can do english subs from non-english audio, and that earlier (less precise) versions could do any language audio -> any language subs, but latest whisper only to english subs.

Anyone found a way?

Annoyingly, something is broken with their anti not stuff, as it keeps refusing to let me see the page.