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Significant changes to Puhti & Mahti authentication coming in April! Read about the SSH key and multi-factor authentication requirements.

Whisper

Whisper is a general-purpose speech recognition model. It is trained on a large dataset of diverse audio and is also a multitasking model that can perform multilingual speech recognition, speech translation, and language identification.

Whisper can be installed to a SD Desktop virtual machine with SD Software installer.

The version provided for SD Desktop is based on Faster-Whisper-XXL.

After installation, Whisper is available as a command-line tool in SD Desktop.

Sample commands:

whisper audio.mp3 --model medium --threads 4

Sample command with diarization enabled:

whisper interview.mp4 --model large --language French --threads 4 --diarize pyannote_v3.0 --diarize_threads 4 --num_speakers 2 -o interview_results

Update on 5.5.2025

Before the latest update, the SD tool installer provided WhisperDO-based Whisper installation. Faster-Whisper-XXL provides now new features, like diarization, and better performance compared to the old WhisperDO.

If you want to upgrade your old WhisperDO installation to the new Faster-Whisper-XXL, you need to first remove the old version with commands:

rm /shared-directory/sd-tools/apptainer/whisper.sif
rm /shared-directory/sd-tools/bin/whisper

After that you can use the SD tool installer to install the new version of Whisper.