I think a lot of people have heard of OpenAI’s local-friendly Whisper model, but I don’t see enough self-hosters talking about WhisperX, so I’ll hop on the soapbox:

Whisper is extremely good when you have lots of audio with one person talking, but fails hard in a conversational setting with people talking over each other. It’s also hard to sync up transcripts with the original audio.

Enter WhisperX: WhisperX is an improved whisper implementation that automatically tags who is talking, and tags each line of speech with a timestamp.

I’ve found it great for DMing TTRPGs — simply record your session with a conference mic, run a transcript with WhisperX, and pass the output to a long-context LLM for easy session summaries. It’s a great way to avoid slowing down the game by taking notes on minor events and NPCs.

I’ve also used it in a hacky script pipeline to bulk download podcast episodes with yt-dlp, create searchable transcripts, and scrub ads by having an LLM sniff out timestamps to cut with ffmpeg.

Privacy-friendly, modest hardware requirements, and good at what it does. WhisperX, apply directly to the forehead.