Whisper 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.

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: