Don’t want to install faster-whisper? Drop the file here.
The first 20 minutes of any recording are transcribed free: a recording up to 20 minutes transcribes in full, a longer one is previewed, and a pack from $6 (500 minutes) transcribes the rest and opens every export, and credits never expire.
Install faster-whisper (CTranslate2 Whisper), pick compute types, and fix cuDNN load errors, int8 quality questions and VAD filter behavior.
pip install faster-whisper. GPU needs cuBLAS + cuDNN 9 for CUDA 12 — the pip wheels of nvidia-cublas-cu12 and nvidia-cudnn-cu12 are the easy path.
from faster_whisper import WhisperModel; m = WhisperModel("large-v3", compute_type="int8_float16")
vad_filter=True skips silence — big win on meeting audio.
Install the CUDA 12 wheels: pip install nvidia-cublas-cu12 nvidia-cudnn-cu12 and export their lib dirs to LD_LIBRARY_PATH — or use compute_type="int8" on CPU.
On clean speech, no measurable WER change; on noisy/accented audio expect a small hit. int8_float16 on GPU is the best size/quality trade.
The default min_silence_duration is aggressive for fast talkers — pass vad_parameters=dict(min_silence_duration_ms=1000).
Use BatchedInferencePipeline — 3-4× throughput on GPU for many files; it's the engine most hosted services (including ours) build on.
More on faster-whisper: the full faster-whisper page · faster-whisper alternatives · all transcription tools
Skip the setup and send the file or the link: see MP3 to text for long recordings, how to transcribe a podcast and an SRT subtitle file from any recording.
Before you choose a transcription tool or service: see an honest roundup of the best transcription services, the cheapest way to transcribe an hour of audio and how our transcription services work.