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Runpod's new Faster-Whisper endpoint delivers 2-4x faster transcription speeds than the original Whisper API, at a fraction of the cost. Perfect for.
You read the title! Whisper just got faster with Runpod's new Faster-Whisper serverless endpoint.
For those who haven't used it before, Whisper is an AI speech recognition model trained on hundreds of thousands of hours of multilingual human speech. It's great for audio captioning (things like podcasts, YouTube videos, TV shows, songs, etc.), and is capable of translating non-English audio to English as it goes, too.
We will be deprecating our existing Whisper serverless endpoint in favor of our new Faster-Whisper endpoint. This endpoint provides the same great service as the regular Whisper endpoint in a fraction of the compute time.
You'll get your Whisper results 2-4x faster with Faster-Whisper! Here's some sample execution times across audio clips of varying lengths, all done with the large-v2 model using Runpod's endpoints:
| Audio Clip | Length | Whisper Time | Faster-Whisper Time | Speedup (×) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Football as a source of revenue | 0:51 | 9.917s | 3.462s | 2.86 |
| GoTranscript transcription test | 3:01 | 44.309s | 13.172s | 3.36 |
| Driving in the U.S. | 6:13 | 1:06.018 | 22.107s | 2.99 |
| Speech by Fiorello H. La Guardia | 15:46 | 2:12.299 | 44.854s | 2.95 |
| Interview of Matthew C. Weiss | 29:33 | 5:53.186 | 1:45.952 | 3.33 |
| Interview of Peter A. and Sharen Gendebien | 1:28:02 | 17:35.431 | 4:39.680 | 3.77 |
| Interview of Brock Robert McIntosh | 3:14:34 | 40:32.268 | 11:16.872 | 3.59 |
Nope! In fact, since the new Faster-Whisper endpoint is 2-4x faster, it's also 2-4x cheaper!
Our serverless APIs only charge the user based on the time it takes to execute a call, $0.00025/s. With the Faster-Whisper endpoint, our pricing for Whisper API access is now more competitive than ever. Most others such as OpenAI ($0.0001/s) charge users for API access based on the length of the audio clip to transcribe (which, we remind, is dramatically longer than the time it takes to return that transcription). Check out the sample cost comparison below for each of the audio clips above:
| Audio Clip | Length | OpenAI Whisper Cost ($) | Runpod Faster-Whisper Cost ($) | Times Cheaper |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Football as a source of revenue | 0:51 | 0.0051 | 0.0009 | 5.89 |
| GoTranscript transcription test | 3:01 | 0.0181 | 0.0033 | 5.50 |
| Driving in the U.S. | 6:13 | 0.0373 | 0.0055 | 6.75 |
| Speech by Fiorello H. La Guardia | 15:46 | 0.0942 | 0.0112 | 8.44 |
| Interview of Matthew C. Weiss | 29:33 | 0.1773 | 0.0265 | 6.69 |
| Interview of Peter A. and Sharen Gendebien | 1:28:02 | 0.5282 | 0.0699 | 7.55 |
| Interview of Brock Robert McIntosh | 3:14:34 | 1.1674 | 0.1692 | 6.90 |
We'd be happy to answer your questions or concerns on our Discord server or via help@runpod.io!
Author profile: Brandon Ikeler
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