# Using Whisper to Transcribe Podcasts

Original: https://swyx.io/whisper-for-podcasts
Published: 2023-07-01

> these are onetime setup things

## Prerequisites

these are onetime setup things

```bash
brew install ffmpeg # takes a while!
git clone https://github.com/ggerganov/whisper.cpp
cd whisper.cpp
make
cd models
./download-ggml-model.sh base.en or ./download-ggml-model.sh medium.en # see full model list here https://github.com/ggerganov/whisper.cpp/tree/master/models
```

## Steps

1. convert your audio file to a 16khz .wav file: `ffmpeg -i SOURCE_FILE.wav -ar 16000 output.wav`
2. THEN you can do `./main -m models/ggml-medium.en.bin -f output.wav >> output.txt` inside of the `whisper.cpp` directory, which pipes the transcription into `output.txt` 
  - at a rate of about 3 minutes of input: 2 minutes to transcribe (for the medium - 769M param model)
  - or at a rate of about 12 minutes of input: 1 minute to transcribe (for the base - 74M param model)