Whisper in Audacity: Transcription, Translation, and Diarization

Audacity---a popular, open-source audio editing software---now features AI-powered audio transcription tools, thanks to the OpenVINO plug-in. Contributed by Intel in early 2024, the OpenVINO plug-in utilizes a port of Whisper to add transcription capabilities to Audacity's already-robust suite of audio editing tools. While not exactly brand new, the plug-in was news to me when I first encountered it while editing recordings of oral history interviews recently. This short blog post is simply to share what I found.

For archivists, librarians, and digital humanities professionals, the OpenVINO plug-in could be a very useful tool for generating transcripts and translations of audio recordings. What's more, the tool features speaker diarization (the process of breaking up a transcript by speaker), which is something the base Whisper model does not support by default. Transcripts can be exported in WebVTT format, which is useful for presenting transcriptions alongside audio recordings on the web.

Audacity can be downloaded here, while the OpenVINO plug-in is available here.