Python on Prateek Sharma

Whisper's turbo model beat large on noisy audio, in practice

Mon, 31 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Building the Video Translator , the assumption going in was that OpenAI Whisper’s larger model would transcribe more accurately. In practice, on clips with loud background music, the turbo model did noticeably better than large — it seems to tolerate messy audio better rather than just being a faster, lower-quality option. Separating vocals from background music first (with demucs) didn’t help as much as expected either; Whisper handled the mixed track better on its own. Worth trying turbo first rather than assuming bigger is more accurate.

CoinTracker

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

CoinTracker is a crypto portfolio and tax platform. I worked on the ingestion and reconciliation side: getting on-chain data into the system correctly, and keeping wallet balances consistent across chains.

Engineering areas

Blockchain integrations

Integrated Cardano and Stellar, reading on-chain data from Snowflake for balance reconciliation, transaction parsing, and portfolio tracking.
Onboarded Akash and Axelar (cross-chain), plus Bitcoin Ordinals, Inscriptions, BRC-20, and Runes via the Ordiscan API.
Worked behind a unified blockchain abstraction so each new chain was a smaller, more predictable piece of work than the last.

Fault-tolerant wallet sync

Wrote the business logic behind Temporal workers for wallet-sync workflows: idempotent, retry-safe, and consistent across chains.
Built reconciliation pipelines and validation checks so cross-chain data disagreements surface as failures rather than silently wrong balances.

Data tooling

Built and consumed Flask REST APIs and CLI scripts for ingestion, validation, and reconciliation.
Used pytest and mypy to keep correctness and type safety enforced in CI.
Adopted Claude Code as an agentic assistant for feature work, debugging, and issue resolution.

Stack

Python · Flask · Temporal · Snowflake · pytest · mypy

Audio Cloning

Mon, 23 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This is an extension of the Video Translator tool that generates cloned audio for short subtitles, improving the quality of the dubbed output. It uses OpenVoice and MeloTTS to clone the original speaker’s voice.

Challenges

Library compatibility. The libraries weren’t functional on Python 3.12, which I was using — they worked on 3.10. So the TTS stage couldn’t live in the same script as the rest of the pipeline.
Short subtitles. The libraries needed a longer sample to clone a voice well, and very short lines (hello, hi, bye) errored out.

What I changed in the fork

openvoice/se_extractor.py had a check that discarded audio segments shorter than 1.5 seconds. Words like hello fall under that. I relaxed the check to allow segments down to ~0.5 seconds, and added a skip for lines too short to process.
Added melo-tts to requirements.txt (the docs mention it but don’t pin it).
Added a driver script that points at a video-translator output folder and runs cloning across every generated audio file.
Patched the library to run on CPU for Apple M1.

The fork is at github.com/pratts/OpenVoice ; test1.py runs the cloning over the translator’s output.

Video Translator

Mon, 23 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I always wanted to watch Japanese anime and other foreign-language films in English without living in the subtitles. During a break I decided to see how far open-source models could get me, and built a script that:

Extracts the background audio from the video.
Transcribes it to a subtitle file in the original language.
Translates each subtitle to English.
Converts the translated subtitles to audio.
Merges the translated audio with the background track.
Muxes the final audio back into the video.

I wanted to lean on open-source tooling and minimize paid services:

Patched OpenVoice for short-clip cloning and CPU inference

Fri, 20 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

While building the Audio Cloning stage of my video-translator pipeline, I hit two blockers in OpenVoice :

openvoice/se_extractor.py discarded audio segments shorter than 1.5 seconds, which meant short subtitle lines (hello, hi, bye) couldn’t be cloned at all. I relaxed the threshold to ~0.5 seconds and added an explicit skip for lines too short to process.
The library assumed a CUDA GPU. I patched it to run on CPU so it worked on Apple M1.

The changes live in my fork at github.com/pratts/OpenVoice . They were scoped to my use case and haven’t been proposed upstream.

Yolobus

Sun, 01 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Yolobus operated intercity buses. I worked on the in-house systems for inventory and bookings.

Engineering areas

Global Distribution System

Designed the database architecture for an in-house GDS managing trip inventory and real-time bookings.

Booking engine

Migrated core services to Python / Django.
Built a serverless ticket-booking engine on AWS Chalice, improving maintainability and transaction scalability.
Implemented high-throughput booking APIs integrating third-party payment and inventory providers (e.g. Redbus, Paytm).

Stack

Python · Django · AWS Chalice · PostgreSQL · REST APIs