Whisper (2022) › 2022: Whisper
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OpenAI released Whisper in September 2022 as a family of encoder-decoder speech models. The models were trained on about 680,000 hours of audio paired with text collected from the web. One checkpoint could transcribe several languages, translate non-English speech into English, identify the spoken language, and predict timestamps.
The paper called the method weak supervision because the dataset was much larger and less tightly curated than a conventional speech corpus. Whisper was evaluated without fine-tuning on each benchmark. Its zero-shot results were competitive across many datasets, although accuracy varied sharply by language and recording condition.
Whisper used a familiar transformer architecture rather than a new speech-specific network. The notable choice was to put many supervised speech tasks into one token-prediction format and train at web scale. OpenAI released several model checkpoints and inference code, which made the system practical to run locally and straightforward to adapt.