faster-whisper

name	faster-whisper
description	Local speech-to-text using faster-whisper. 4-6x faster than OpenAI Whisper with identical accuracy; GPU acceleration enables ~20x realtime transcription. Supports standard and distilled models with word-level timestamps.
version	1.0.4
author	ThePlasmak
homepage	https://github.com/ThePlasmak/faster-whisper
tags	["audio","transcription","whisper","speech-to-text","ml","cuda","gpu"]
platforms	["windows","linux","macos","wsl2"]
metadata	{"moltbot":{"emoji":"🗣️","requires":{"bins":["ffmpeg","python3"]}}}

Faster Whisper

Local speech-to-text using faster-whisper — a CTranslate2 reimplementation of OpenAI's Whisper that runs 4-6x faster with identical accuracy. With GPU acceleration, expect ~20x realtime transcription (a 10-minute audio file in ~30 seconds).

When to Use

Use this skill when you need to:

• Transcribe audio/video files — meetings, interviews, podcasts, lectures, YouTube videos
• Convert speech to text locally — no API costs, works offline (after model download)
• Batch process multiple audio files — efficient for large collections
• Generate subtitles/captions — word-level timestamps available
• Multilingual transcription — supports 99+ languages with auto-detection

Trigger phrases: "transcribe this audio", "convert speech to text", "what did they say", "make a transcript", "audio to text", "subtitle this video"

When NOT to use:

• Real-time/streaming transcription (use streaming-optimized tools instead)
• Cloud-only environments without local compute
• Files <10 seconds where API call latency doesn't matter

Quick Reference

Task	Command	Notes
Basic transcription	./scripts/transcribe audio.mp3	Uses default distil-large-v3
Faster English	./scripts/transcribe audio.mp3 --model distil-medium.en --language en	English-only, 6.8x faster
Maximum accuracy	./scripts/transcribe audio.mp3 --model large-v3-turbo --beam-size 10	Slower but best quality
Word timestamps	./scripts/transcribe audio.mp3 --word-timestamps	For subtitles/captions
JSON output	./scripts/transcribe audio.mp3 --json -o output.json	Programmatic access
Multilingual	./scripts/transcribe audio.mp3 --model large-v3-turbo	Auto-detects language