OTranscribe: A free and open tool for transcribing audio interviews

I needed to do this this week (transcribe an interview with multiple speakers) and used https://github.com/MahmoudAshraf97/whisper-diarization

Worked excellent.

It generates both a file that just contains a line per uninterrupted speaker speech prefixed with the speaker number, as well as a file with timestamps which I believe would be used as subtitles.

Maybe it isn't perfectly clear, but OTranscribe isn't an automatic speech-to-text tool, but instead, a UI for assisting in manual transcribing.

So no AI here, folks.

Are there any open-source or paid apps/shareware/freeware that can:

- Transcribe word-by-word in real time as audio is recorded

- Work entirely locally

- Use relatively recent open-source local models?

I've been using otter.ai for real-time meeting transcriptions - letting me multitask and instantly catch up if I'm asked a question by skimming the most recent few seconds worth of the transcript - but it's far from perfect and occasionally their real-time service has significant transcription delays, not to mention it requires internet connectivity.

Most of the Whisper-based apps out there, though, as well as (when I last checked) the whisper.cpp demo code, require an entire recording to be ingested at once. There are others that rely on e.g. Apple's dictation frameworks, which is a bit dated in capability at the moment.

Anything folks are using out there?

Kinda surprised to not have AI integration.

You do still need to proof and QA even AI results, if you want a publication quality result, and do things like attribute who is speaking when (at least Whisper can't do that), and correct "unusual" last names and things. So I feel like people using AI still need good tools for the correcting/finishing/proofing too, that would be similar to the tools for non-assisted transcription.

From their FAQ:

    Does oTranscribe automatically convert audio into text?
    
    Sorry! It doesn’t. oTranscribe makes the manual task of transcribing
    audio a lot less painful. But you still have to do the transcription.

I currently use Aiko’s free iOS app which does offline transcription using OpenAI’s Whisper model. It has been working pretty well for me so far. It can export in formats like SRT, TXT, CSV, JSON and text with timestamps too. https://sindresorhus.com/aiko

You're always welcome to try my service TurboScribe https://turboscribe.ai/ if you need a transcript of an audio/video file. It's 100% free up to 3 files per day (30 minutes per file) and the paid plan is unlimited and transcribes files up to 10 hours long each. It also supports speaker recognition, common export formats (TXT, DOCX, PDF, SRT, CSV), as well as some AI tools for working with your transcript.

I was curious how good a transcription I could get from what may be the best multimoldal LLM currently, Gemini-1.5-Pro-Experiment-0801, so I had it transcribe five minutes of an interview between Ezra Klein and Nancy Pelosi from earlier today. The results are here:

https://www.gally.net/temp/20240809geminitranscription/index...

Aside from some minor punctuation and capitalization issues, Gemini’s transcription looks nearly perfect to me. There were only one or two words that I think it misheard. If I had transcribed the audio myself, I would have made more mistakes than that.

One passage struck me in particular:

  And then he comes up with "weird," which becomes viral and the rest, and here he is. 

How did Gemini know to put “weird” in quotation marks, to indicate—correctly—that the speaker was referring to Walz’s use of the word as a word? According to Politico, Walz first used the word in that context in the media on July 23.

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/26/trump-vance-weird-0...

Just pitching in a transcription tool that lets you transcribe video and audio files using Whisper and WASM in your browser, and get a .txt, .srt, .vtt file. Maybe in the future support for Whisper Turbo?

https://video2srt.ccextractor.org/

Disclaimer: Working on this project.

Use this a lot. It's nice and simple and has exactly the tools you need (playback speed control, easy pause/play) and nothing more. Greatly prefer it over automatic transcription tools give you 40 pages of 'umm's and 'ahhhh's to filter through and edit.

I started making an open source macOS app to do this with whisper and potentially pyannote.

It is functional but a bit slow. I think using whisper directly instead of swift bindings will help a lot.

Really interested in adding diarisation but having a lot of trouble converting Pyannote to CoreML. Pyannote runs so slowly with torch on CPU. Haven’t gotten around putting my latest work for that on GitHub yet.

Happy to accept contributions —

Some priorities right now:

* Fixing signing for local builds

* Replace swift whisper with whisper cpp

* Allowing users to provide their own models

https://github.com/Stack-Studio-Digital-Collective/Auditif

I'm working on the tool, that includes AI. My original target is to test it on my https://www.youtube.com/c/VectorPodcast by offering something that Lex Fridman does for his episodes.

Current features: 1. Download from YT 2. Transcribe using Vosk (output has time codes included) 3. Speaker diarization using pyannote - this isn't perfect and needs a bit more ironing out.

What needs to be done: 4. Store the transcription in a search engine (can include vectors) 5. Implement a webapp

If anyone here is interested to join forces, let me know.

fantastic tool; I used it a lot to transcribe interviews during plane travels where there was no internet, and I needed to fill the time. Really useful to have if you do a lot of interviews

Any new language support in the future? Fingers crossed for japanese

I made a similar tool for making tables of contents for youtube videos: https://youtoc.by/

Not developing it actively after I created tables of contents for the several videos I needed, years ago. If I ever need it again, I will probably work on mobile UI (aka responsive)

If you are looking for something automatic that also allows you to interact with your transcripts chatgpt style then I would recommend https://www.videototextai.com/

You can also try Scribe (free chrome extension and iOS app) https://www.appblit.com/scribe

Talio.ai allows you to do this with chatGPT style chat with the transcript plus numerous other features https://talio.ai

Anyone knows one with transcription and translate in real time?

Nowadays, I use libretranslate/libretranslate and pluja/whishper to do this, but not at real time.

Looks cool! Unclear from the docs, but does it support non-English languages? How about mixed-language interviews?

Does anybody tested it with Brazilian Portuguese? It is a hard problem, since we have too many accents.

Pretty amazing what a webapp an do. I whished there were more lile them and not all these native apps

Anyone knows a free tool for generating subtitles for movies and series videos ?

oTranscribe is a free option for transcription but in many cases it's just too simple

See also TranscriberAG: <https://transag.sourceforge.net/>

If you just want quick transcriptions of YouTube video this works pretty well https://www.you-tldr.com/