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Writeout.ai – Transcribe and translate any audio files
- osrec 4y agoWhen you say free, do we still need to subscribe to other services?
- mpociot 4y agoWell if you want to self-host it, then yes. You will need an OpenAI account/API key for it to work.
- steeve 4y agoFYI: "Writeout uses the recently released OpenAI Whisper API to transcribe audio files. You can upload any audio file, and the application will send it through the OpenAI Whisper API using Laravel's queued jobs. Translation makes use of the new OpenAI Chat API and chunks the generated VTT file into smaller parts to fit them into the prompt context limit."
- aktuel 4y agoWhat languages does it support?
- mpociot 4y agoIt uses the OpenAI Whisper API, which according to their API documentation supports: Afrikaans, Arabic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Belarusian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Kazakh, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Marathi, Maori, Nepali, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Tamil, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese, and Welsh. See https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/speech-to-text/quickstart https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/speech-to-text/quick...
- vhanda 4y agoThe title seems quite disingenuous. A better description would be "A PHP based web app which calls OpenAI's Whisper API to transcribe speech"
- MrOwnPut 4y agoMany people on HN infamously called Dropbox just an rsync script, right? It's usually all in the details and delivery (and ya'know we're lazy and lack time to setup stuff locally) Though I wouldn't really knock anything free and open source either way.
- blululu 4y agoThe objection here is more structural than technical. The famous dropbox objection is 'anyone could do this' - even though they might not have the wherewithal to do so. The objection here is that the open source project is relying on a closed source paid service to do all the heavy lifting. Someone is going to need to foot the bill, which means this project will eventually have to answer some tough questions about funding, and what the project actually delivers.
- phkahler 4y agoThis is not open source. The wrapper may be, but it's using a non open source cloud service.
- rcme 4y agoI love all of these random "companies" popping up that just make either one or a handful of API calls to OpenAI. Come on people, try harder!
- mpociot 4y agoThis project is meant to be especially for educational reasons, which is why it's entirely open source
- LunaSea 4y agoIt's a good metaphor for a good part of the startup scene: good looking gift wrapping around tools built by smarter people.
- masukomi 4y agoin their defense, there's a lot of value there. As i commented elsewhere here, I'm frustrated that this particular thing isn't running the transcription locally, but this is a _massive_ improvement on what the "tools built by smarter people" built. Sometimes "good looking gift wrapping" is a huge value unto itself. Also, it isn't fair to good UX and UI developers to imply that that isn't also really hard work to get right. It's just different work using a different form of thinking. Not lesser in any way. And... without the people who could make the "good looking gift wrapping" most apps would suck a lot harder than they already do.
- nico 4y agoPeople are excited and doing things, that’s wonderful. What are you doing besides complaining? Everything starts small. Also, the most important thing about a service is attracting customers, not the tech stack under it. Facebook was made with PHP, Twitter famously failed constantly while struggling with user growth. I’d much rather have tons of users with a tech stack that is a wrapper for a bunch of other stuff, than have super impressive in-house tech and no users.
- rcme 4y ago> People are excited and doing things, that’s wonderful. What are you doing besides complaining? I don't think people are excited about making API calls. They see a land grab and are clamoring for their piece. As for what I'm doing, I work on my own products that, I hope, push the envelope, at least slightly. And I have seen AI companies that are doing good work using OpenAI's tools, but this isn't one of them.
- ptero 4y agoI want something that I can self host. I am perfectly OK with a single language and a few mistakes here and there. Does such a thing exist? I would gladly donate to a kickstarter project for this before trying to build one myself.
- mpociot 4y agoYou mean without using the OpenAI API? This project is open source and on GitHub, so you can self-host this if you want!
- htrp 4y agoJust download whisper .... If you own a gpu use this one https://github.com/openai/whisper https://github.com/openai/whisper If you don't own a gpu use this one https://github.com/ggerganov/whisper.cpp https://github.com/ggerganov/whisper.cpp (this one is very very slow)
- travisjungroth 4y agowhisper.cpp is not universally very very slow. With an M1 Macbook and the medium model it's faster than real time. There may be some accuracy lost because it uses a different search method and if you choose to run a smaller model.
- inconceivable 4y agowhisperx also adds improved timestamping, closed captioning output, and beta diarization (speaker labeling) support. unfortunately it doesn't seem to support m4a out of the box but you can convert to mp3 (upgrade the sound lib dependency first) or wav with ffmpeg.
- stuxnet79 4y agowhisper is extremely simple to use on the command line. Just install it with pip and you are off to the races.
- kkielhofner 4y agoYou (essentially) need GPU but here you go: https://github.com/ahmetoner/whisper-asr-webservice https://github.com/ahmetoner/whisper-asr-webservice For your requirements the medium.en model (max) should be satisfactory.
- adithyasrin 4y agoBtw your imprint and privacy policy requires margins and changes to references of whatthediff.
- albert180 4y agoI don't see any benefit over using Whisper locally or the API directly
- elaus 4y agoThanks a lot for making this! Just last week I was trying out the transcription APIs of AWS and Google Cloud and they produced rather bad results for a German interview (wrong punctuation and capitalization, about 1 misheard word per sentence). I didn't know OpenAI had an API for that as well, but now I was able to try it out and it's magnitudes better: Perfect spelling and only 1 wrong word in 2 minutes of audio (an abbreviation) that I was able to understand. It even filters out filler words! You just saved me literally hours of work by showing the powers of OpenAI! (Reading this back it sounds like an ad, but I'm in no way affiliated with any of those services. I'm just very happy.)
- masukomi 4y agonote that you can run openAI's whisper locally. The language model and tools are open sourced. It is finicky to set up if you're not a python dev. Just wanted to let you know that it's an option and it works literally exactly as well. You can even choose if you want to sacrifice quality for speed of conversion. The experience of using it will just be a lot.... geekier. command line call that produces a text format with timestamps on every line.
- SlickStef11 4y agoJust tried it out and wow! insane. Free and open source. Thank you!
- paxys 4y agoOpenAI isn’t running a charity. This “free” service is going to run into that reality sooner or later, so I’d suggest not using it for any real work and instead buying Whisper API tokens directly.
- MrOwnPut 4y agoOr use this nice UI for now to trial, and when that reality comes... transition to the API if you still need to do what you need to to? So I would suggest this project to try things out, then setup Whisper locally :) But what do I know, I'm just in the ether...
- masukomi 4y agoI don't understand why this doesn't actually do the transcription / translation locally. Sending the data to openAI for paid conversion makes no sense. Whisper can be legally run on your computer, for free. Running it locally way more sense for an open source project, because why would you pay and be dependent upon a 3rd party if you don't have to be. It also makes way more sense for a service because then _you_ don't have to give all your money to openAI and skim off of what's left. This is just.... bewildering. I really wanted to use it, but I'm not going to pay openAI to transcribe podcasts for me when i can literally use the exact same language model and do it locally with free open source code. I'm hoping someone will fork this and teach it to run whisper locally. [edit: getting the exact right version of python and PyTorch and dependencies to make whisper run was a pain but now i've got it set up and it's a trivial command to transcribe every mp3 i feel like transcribing]
- smooke 4y agoGood points.
- cloudking 4y agoHere is a version that runs locally with WASM https://whisper.ggerganov.com/ https://whisper.ggerganov.com/ https://github.com/ggerganov/whisper.cpp/tree/master/examples/whisper.wasm https://github.com/ggerganov/whisper.cpp/tree/master/example...
- paxys 4y agoBecause that would involve actual work. A box sitting somewhere that passes through API calls to OpenAI is trivial to set up.
- corobo 4y agoHow's it handling long files? Let's say worst case scenario, a 2 hour long podcast. What ratio are you getting (podcast length to transcription time) and does it error out memory wise as others suggest?
- masukomi 4y ago
- CSSer 4y agoIs there any chance you could expose a pathway to use a local instance of Whisper? I ask primarily because OpenAI completely open-sourced Whisper in September 2022[0]. It seems odd to me to default to or encourage the usage of a paid service for something that appears to be available for free under MIT license including models[1]. My understanding is that the only reason OpenAI even setup the paid API is because it "can also be hard to run [sic]". Personally, I'm skeptical. I"m not knocking them for it but I could see how this is just brand capitalization. [0]: https://openai.com/blog/introducing-chatgpt-and-whisper-apis#whisper-api:~:text=we%20open%2Dsourced%20in%20September%202022 https://openai.com/blog/introducing-chatgpt-and-whisper-apis... [1]: https://github.com/openai/whisper https://github.com/openai/whisper
- nonoesp 4y agoIf you use the large-v2 model they expose via the API, the more accurate, in your local machine, you'll see that even though it works great it's slow and won't work for long audio files because of memory limitations. It's fairly easy and quick to run Whisper for free either locally in an Anaconda environment with Python or the command-line interface or, even better, in a Google Colab notebook. Here's a sample notebook that builds on a notebook by Pete Warden. https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1sxsey3n0jd09MjUd9Ky4mvMTzjzJaf_Q?usp=sharing https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1sxsey3n0jd09MjUd9Ky...
- rolisz 4y agoOn a 1080Ti (so a 6 year old GPU), the large model runs in 1x time (so transcribing 10 minutes takes 10 minutes) and I've successfully transcribed even 1h+ files.
- kkielhofner 4y agoFWIF an optimized implementation I've been working on comes in at roughly 70x realtime (large-v2, beam size 5) on an RTX 3090.
- 4y ago
- 101008 4y agoThis works with Whisper behind the scenes and it is true: running Whisper locally it is easy and this may not be needed (it even adds overhead, since Whisper gives me the .srt file directly, I can ask to use the tiny model to make it faster, etc). BUT if my brother (accountant) needs something like this, he wouldn't be able to install Whisper: he wouldn't even be able to open Github. So I think frontend GUI that behind the scenes runs models are always welcome. I think this would be much better if it would run Whisper on their server instead of using an external API, but that's their decission.
- endisneigh 4y agoat the very least they should host the model and point their service to their own locally hosted whisper instance...
- badloginagain 4y agoJust a note for anyone basing their business on the .ai TLD. It's technically the domain for Anguilla, a literal British colony in the Caribbean. It appears to be managed by some random guy- check out the .ai registration FAQ: http://whois.ai/faq.html http://whois.ai/faq.html If you are going to use .ai, just be aware the top level of the domain appears to be managed by some dude with a gmail account. Its not necessarily bad, but something to consider if you're planning to host your billion dollar AI startup on it.
- Belphemur 4y agoI wonder how a simple individual can acquire control on a ccTLD. I always thought they would need to be vetted by the government of that the ccTLD represents.
- badloginagain 4y agoI think they found the one weird software dev in Anguilla willing to do it. The "Offshore Information Services" link on the .ai wikipedia page "registry" link redirects to the dudes wikipedia page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.ai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.ai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vince_Cate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vince_Cate A colorful character to say the least, and exactly the kind of person I'd expect to be running the ccTLD of a small caribbean island.
- xur17 4y ago> Cate engaged in civil disobedience against U.S. cryptography policy by setting up a webpage inviting readers to "become an international arms trafficker in one click". The page contained an HTML form which, when submitted, would e-mail three lines of Perl code implementing the RSA public-key encryption algorithm to a server in Anguilla; this could have qualified as unlicensed export of munitions under U.S. law at the time.
- leansensei 4y agoThe definition of "chaotic neutral"!
- eternalban 4y agoWhy not just use whisper.cpp locally?
- cvhashim04 4y agoGood tool translate and decipher the lyrics of ATL rappers like Future.
- dinkblam 4y agodoes anyone know of a complete system or player to automatically generate subtitles based on speech recognition (apart from YouTube)? there are a lot of older series/movies with where the speech is hard to discern but no subtitles are available for download. i have been thinking about creating an AutoSubtitle app for years, but haven't had a free day to tackle it - hope someone else beats me to it.
- killthebuddha 4y agoThe number of people on HN b****ing about people shipping MVPs that build on OpenAI is hilarious and makes me feel like HN has definitely jumped the shark.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mofle 4y agoIf anyone wants transcription locally (on-device) on macOS or iOS, I just released a free app for it: https://sindresorhus.com/aiko https://sindresorhus.com/aiko It runs Whisper on your device.
- lee101 4y ago[dead]