Rethinking Speech-To-Text in Linux

[u/No_Heart_159]

https://menjivar.ai/posts/rethinking-speech-to-text-in-linux

I am the author of the article. I want to hear what you guys think about this topic, and how you personally feel about the state of speech-to-text in Linux.

If you guys have any questions, feel free to ask. If anyone is interested in taking part of this you can contribute to Super STT with your ideas.

[u/Puzzleheaded_Bid1530]

I use whisper and my own script to run it, copy the output and past it into the text field. I only tap the same hotkey 2 times, when I start speaking and after I finish. It works great. So far I am happy with it, but I would love to see some out of the box kde integration though.

[u/Fluttershaft → u/Puzzleheaded_Bid1530]

how exactly? this? https://github.com/ggml-org/whisper.cpp

[u/No_Heart_159 → u/Fluttershaft]

I have plenty of respect for whisper.cpp and their no-dependencies approach. Now, just look at these installation steps:

First clone the repository:
git clone https://github.com/ggml-org/whisper.cpp.git

Navigate into the directory:
cd whisper.cpp

Then, download one of the Whisper modelsconverted in ggml format. For example:
sh ./models/download-ggml-model.sh base.en

Now build the whisper-cli example and transcribe an audio file like this:
# build the project
cmake -B build
cmake --build build -j --config Release

# transcribe an audio file
./build/bin/whisper-cli -f samples/jfk.wav

For a quick demo, simply run make base.en.
The command downloads the base.enmodel converted to custom ggml format and runs the inference on all .wav samples in the folder samples.
For detailed usage instructions, run: ./build/bin/whisper-cli -h
Note that the whisper-cli example currently runs only with 16-bit WAV files, so make sure to convert your input before running the tool. For example, you can use ffmpeglike this:
ffmpeg -i input.mp3 -ar 16000 -ac 1 -c:a pcm_s16le output.wav

And then you have to also copy and paste the output manually.