Compare Amazon Transcribe vs. Whisper

Amazon Transcribe simplifies the integration of speech-to-text features for developers looking to enhance their applications. Analyzing and searching audio data presents significant challenges for computers, making it essential to convert spoken words into written format for effective usage in various applications. Traditionally, businesses had to collaborate with transcription services that imposed costly contracts and were complicated to integrate with existing technology, making the transcription process cumbersome. Moreover, many of these services relied on outdated technologies that struggled to handle specific situations, such as the low-quality audio typical in contact center environments, leading to decreased accuracy. In contrast, Amazon Transcribe utilizes an advanced deep learning technique known as automatic speech recognition (ASR) to convert speech into text efficiently and with high precision. This service is versatile, allowing for the transcription of customer service interactions, the automation of subtitling, and the creation of metadata for media files, ultimately resulting in a comprehensive and searchable archive of content. With its user-friendly design and robust capabilities, Amazon Transcribe stands out as an essential tool for developers aiming to enhance the functionality of their applications.

We have developed and are releasing an open-source neural network named Whisper, which achieves levels of accuracy and resilience in English speech recognition that are comparable to human performance. This automatic speech recognition (ASR) system is trained on an extensive dataset comprising 680,000 hours of multilingual and multitask supervised information gathered from online sources. Our research demonstrates that leveraging such a comprehensive and varied dataset significantly enhances the system's capability to handle different accents, ambient noise, and specialized terminology. Additionally, Whisper facilitates transcription across various languages and provides translation into English from those languages. We are making available both the models and the inference code to support the development of practical applications and to encourage further exploration in the field of robust speech processing. The architecture of Whisper follows a straightforward end-to-end design, utilizing an encoder-decoder Transformer framework. The process begins with dividing the input audio into 30-second segments, which are then transformed into log-Mel spectrograms before being input into the encoder. By making this technology accessible, we aim to foster innovation in speech recognition technologies.