Open Source speech-to-text software for audio files in English

Question

I have hundreds of hours of audio files in English that I need to transcript to the same language. Do you know a speech-to-text software that I can use to do it automatically?

• Even when its automatic transcription will not be perfect, it will be good enough for my use case
• Support English language at least
• Open source
• It should runs on Linux, but other platforms are okay
• The audio files are on MP4, but I can convert them to a different format if it's necessary
• The result should be simple text files
• Privacy is important, so I can't use an online service

I imagine it like an application which I could use it like this:

$ transcriber --input 001.mp4 --output 001.txt

With something like this, it will be easy to write a script to transcribe all the audio files.

Thanks,

Answer 1

This is going to sound somewhat weird, but you can upload it to Youtube (assuming its not copyrighted material) and have it add its auto CC, and download that file.

Far from perfect, but a possible solution.

Answer 2

OpenAI's Whisper is pretty slow, but has state-of-the-art performance. There currently is no system that has higher accuracy for general purpose transcription.

Answer 3

I recommend using https://transcribe.wreally.com. Neither your audio file, nor your transcription is transmitted to their website, so your privacy requirement is satisfied. You can use it offline but you have to use it in the Chrome browser. (Unfortunately it does not satisfy your open source requirement.)

It is similar to youtube's transcription process, but better.