Speech to Text

Speech to Text#

An In-depth Exploration of WhisperX: A Cutting-Edge Automatic Speech Recognition System#

[Bain et al., 2023] is a state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) system, developed by OpenAI. It is designed to provide rapid transcription services, complete with word-level timestamps and speaker diarization.

Key Features#

  • Multispeaker ASR: WhisperX incorporates speaker diarization from pyannote-audio, a feature that enables the system to distinguish between different speakers within an audio file.

  • Voice Activity Detection (VAD) Preprocessing: This feature mitigates hallucination and batching issues without any degradation in Word Error Rate (WER).

Potential Challenges#

Despite its advanced capabilities, users of WhisperX should be aware of certain limitations:

  • Short Audio Files: WhisperX may not perform optimally with extremely short audio files (less than one second in duration).

  • Long Audio Files: For audio files exceeding 10 minutes in length, WhisperX may occasionally hallucinate, resulting in the repetition of certain phrases.

  • Speaker Diarization: The diarization feature of pyannote may struggle to differentiate between speakers with very similar vocal characteristics.

Installation Procedure#

To utilize WhisperX, follow the steps outlined below:

  1. Create a Python3.10 environment:

    conda create --name whisperx python=3.10
conda activate whisperx

  2. Install PyTorch:

    conda install pytorch==2.0.0 torchaudio==2.0.0 pytorch-cuda=11.8 -c pytorch -c nvidia

  3. Install WhisperX:

    pip install git+https://github.com/m-bain/whisperx.git

Conclusion#

WhisperX represents a significant advancement in the field of automatic speech recognition. Its ability to provide word-level timestamps and speaker diarization makes it an invaluable tool for transcribing long audio files. However, users should be cognizant of its limitations when dealing with particularly short or long audio files, and when differentiating between similar sounding speakers.

[BHHZ23]

Max Bain, Jaesung Huh, Tengda Han, and Andrew Zisserman. Whisperx: time-accurate speech transcription of long-form audio. INTERSPEECH 2023, 2023.

[LBG20]

Daniel M Low, Kate H Bentley, and Satrajit S Ghosh. Automated assessment of psychiatric disorders using speech: a systematic review. Laryngoscope investigative otolaryngology, 5(1):96–116, 2020.

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