Introducing Whisper

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Whisper is an automated speech recognition (ASR) system educated on 680,000 hours of multilingual and multitask supervised knowledge collected from the net. We present that using such a big and various dataset results in improved robustness to accents, background noise and technical language. Furthermore, it allows transcription in a number of languages, in addition to translation from these languages into English. We’re open-sourcing fashions and inference code to function a basis for constructing helpful purposes and for additional analysis on sturdy speech processing.

The Whisper structure is an easy end-to-end strategy, applied as an encoder-decoder Transformer. Enter audio is break up into 30-second chunks, transformed right into a log-Mel spectrogram, after which handed into an encoder. A decoder is educated to foretell the corresponding textual content caption, intermixed with particular tokens that direct the one mannequin to carry out duties resembling language identification, phrase-level timestamps, multilingual speech transcription, and to-English speech translation.

Different present approaches continuously use smaller, extra carefully paired audio-text coaching datasets, or use broad however unsupervised audio pretraining. As a result of Whisper was educated on a big and various dataset and was not fine-tuned to any particular one, it doesn’t beat fashions focusing on LibriSpeech efficiency, a famously aggressive benchmark in speech recognition. Nevertheless, after we measure Whisper’s zero-shot efficiency throughout many various datasets we discover it’s way more sturdy and makes 50% fewer errors than these fashions.

A couple of third of Whisper’s audio dataset is non-English, and it’s alternately given the duty of transcribing within the unique language or translating to English. We discover this strategy is especially efficient at studying speech to textual content translation and outperforms the supervised SOTA on CoVoST2 to English translation zero-shot.

We hope Whisper’s excessive accuracy and ease of use will enable builders so as to add voice interfaces to a a lot wider set of purposes. Try the paper, mannequin card, and code to study extra particulars and to check out Whisper.