Transcribe audio to text

This article is part of a tutorial series on txtai, an AI-powered search engine.

This article covers the transcription of audio files to text using models provided by Hugging Face.

Install dependencies

Install txtai and all dependencies.

pip install txtai

# Get test data
wget -N https://github.com/neuml/txtai/releases/download/v2.0.0/tests.tar.gz
tar -xvzf tests.tar.gz

Create a Transcription instance

The Transcription instance is the main entrypoint for transcribing audio to text. The pipeline abstracts transcribing audio into a one line call!

The pipeline executes logic to read audio files into memory, run the data through a machine learning model and output the results to text.

from txtai.pipeline import Transcription

# Create transcription model
transcribe = Transcription("facebook/wav2vec2-large-960h")

Transcribe audio to text

The example below shows how to transcribe a list of audio files to text. Let's transcribe audio to text and look at each result.

from IPython.display import Audio, display

files = ["Beijing_mobilises.wav", "Canadas_last_fully.wav", "Maine_man_wins_1_mil.wav", "Make_huge_profits.wav", "The_National_Park.wav", "US_tops_5_million.wav"]
files = ["txtai/%s" % x for x in files]

for x, text in enumerate(transcribe(files)):
  display(Audio(files[x]))
  print(text)
  print()

Baging mobilizes invasion craft along coast as tiwan tensions escalates
Canada's last fully intact ice shelf has suddenly collapsed forming a manhatten sized ice berg
Main man wins from lottery ticket
Make huge profits without working make up to one hundred thousand dollars a day
National park service warns against sacrificing slower friends in a bare attack
U s virus cases top a million

Overall the results are solid. Each result sounds phonetically like the audio. There is an open task with the Hugging Face models to use a language model to decode the model outputs and further improve result accuracy.

Keep an eye out for those updated models!