I downloaded Whisper and tried it out. I fed it a 20-minute screencast I
did about 10 years ago. There are about four levels you can choose which
trade accuracy for speed. I tried the recommended level, down one from
the highest. After a substantial wait, I got the results.
First, the input did not contain any hints about punctuation and
sentences, such as what you have to use with most other text-to-speech
programs. It decided where to end sentences and place commas and put
them where I thought they should be.
I was quite surprised that it correctly understood “LaTeX”. Also I
was surprised when it understood “Skim” (a pdf reader on the Mac) as
“SCIM”. This is the evidence of nerd hands in the selection of the
training set. But it did not correctly get “pdfTeX”; it came out as
“PDF Tech”. Unsurprisingly, it did not capitalize the names of our
products that I mentioned in the screen cast, such as “Scientific
WorkPlace”.
It allows as an input option a string of text that is consumed by the
program before it attempts to transcribe the input file. For the next
run, I used the option
--initial_prompt "pdfTeX, LaTeX, skim, Scientific WorkPlace, Scientific
Word"
and the result was flawless but for one error: it still failed to
recognize “pdfTeX”.
It appears that it does not try to break the text into paragraphs, but I
may not have given it enough text to test that.
They claim to support 99 languages and to translate text from one of
these languages to English.
I ran a shorter test of it after disconnecting from all networks, and it
succeeded. This seems to say that the model data is on my computer.
—Barry
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