2024/05/06 by Antonio Bevilacqua, Paolo Saviano, Bevilacqua, Antonio +5
Decision Sciences · #Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS) #Ethics in Business and Education #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Sound (cs.SD) #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2405.03484
openalex publication_date 2024/05/06 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Large general-purpose transformer models have recently become the mainstay in the realm of speech analysis. In particular, Whisper achieves state-of-the-art results in relevant tasks such as speech recognition, translation, language identification, and voice activity detection. However, Whisper models are not designed to be used in real-time conditions, and this limitation makes them unsuitable for a vast plethora of practical applications. In this paper, we introduce Whispy, a system intended to bring live capabilities to the Whisper pretrained models. As a result of a number of architectural optimisations, Whispy is able to consume live audio streams and generate high level, coherent voice transcriptions, while still maintaining a low computational cost. We evaluate the performance of our system on a large repository of publicly available speech datasets, investigating how the transcription mechanism introduced by Whispy impacts on the Whisper output. Experimental results show how Whispy excels in robustness, promptness, and accuracy.