Cited by 338Speech Recognition and SynthesisSpeech and Audio ProcessingMusic and Audio Processing

WhisperX: Time-Accurate Speech Transcription of Long-Form Audio

Open access
Bain, Max, Huh, Jaesung, Han, Tengda, Zisserman, Andrew·2023·INTERSPEECH 2023

Abstract

Large-scale, weakly-supervised speech recognition models, such as Whisper, have demonstrated impressive results on speech recognition across domains and languages. However, their application to long audio transcription via buffered or sliding window approaches is prone to drifting, hallucination & repetition; and prohibits batched transcription due to their sequential nature. Further, timestamps corresponding each utterance are prone to inaccuracies and word-level timestamps are not available out-of-the-box. To overcome these challenges, we present WhisperX, a time-accurate speech recognition system with word-level timestamps utilising voice activity detection and forced phoneme alignment. In doing so, we demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on long-form transcription and word segmentation benchmarks. Additionally, we show that pre-segmenting audio with our proposed VAD Cut & Merge strategy improves transcription quality and enables a twelve-fold transcription speedup via batched inference.

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  • E2E models tend to be inaccurate in predicting word-level timestamps.

    “They also tend to be inaccurate in predicting word-level timestamps [Bain et al. 2023].”

    From Measuring the Accuracy of Automatic Speech Recognition Solutions (2023) · cites this paper as Bain et al. 2023

    Section 3.4.1 reports that extracting word-level timestamps directly from Whisper significantly underperforms in word-segmentation precision and recall, and Section 2.7 says that methods using Whisper’s cross-attention scores are prone to timestamp inaccuracies. These findings support the point for Whisper, but the cited paper does not establish that E2E models generally tend to be inaccurate. (LLM, conf=0.84)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • A related study reported a speed increase of up to twelve times without sacrificing transcription accuracy.

    “A related study reported a speed increase of up to twelve times without sacriicing transcription accuracy [Bain et al. 2023].”

    From Measuring the Accuracy of Automatic Speech Recognition Solutions (2023) · cites this paper as Bain et al. 2023

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Research works printed but not linked: 4

  1. H. Chen, H. Zhang, L. Wang, K. A. Lee, M. Liu, and J. Dang, "Self-supervised audio-visual speaker representation with co- meta learning," in ICASSP, 2023.
  2. G. Gelly and J.-L. Gauvain, "Optimization of rnn-based speech activity detection," IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, vol. 26, no. 3, pp. 646-656, 2018.
  3. H. Bredin, R. Yin, J. M. Coria, G. Gelly, P. Korshunov, M. Lavechin, D. Fustes, H. Titeux, W. Bouaziz, and M.-P. Gill, "pyannote.audio: neural building blocks for speaker diarization," in ICASSP, 2020.
  4. Y.-Y. Yang, M. Hira, Z. Ni, A. Astafurov, C. Chen, C. Puhrsch, D. Pollack, D. Genzel, D. Greenberg, E. Z. Yang et al., "Torchau- dio: Building blocks for audio and speech processing," in ICASSP 2022-2022 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP). IEEE, 2022, pp. 6982-6986.

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Authors
Bain, M., Huh, J., Han, T., & Zisserman, A.
Affiliations
University of Oxford (GB)
Venue
INTERSPEECH 2023
Publisher
ISCA
Published
2023-08-20
Pages
4489-4493
ISSN
2308-457X (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W4385822293
Cited by
337
References
29
Citations by year
2026: 134 · 2025: 123 · 2024: 65 · 2023: 15
FWCI
59.71
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Licence
cc-by
Locations
  • Interspeech (USB) (publishedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (cc-by)
Funders
Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/T028572/1)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Speech Recognition and Synthesis
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Signal Processing › Speech and Audio Processing
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Signal Processing › Music and Audio Processing
Keywords
speech transcription, voice activity detection, forced alignment, phone recognition, timestamping

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