Transcribe Audio to Text for FREE | Whisper AI Step-by-Step Tutorial

Hello, everyone, and welcome back  to my channel, Jennifer Marie, where I teach you different  ways to make money online and how to become a work-from-home freelancer. So some of my most popular videos  talk to you about transcription, how to transcribe audio to  text, and in today's tutorial, I'm excited to show you how  you can convert audio files or video files to text completely  for free without any limit. We are going to be using something called Whisper, and Whisper is a machine learning model for speech recognition and transcription.

And it's created by Open AI. Open AI are also the creators of ChatGPT. This is completely free, and  Whisper supports 99 languages, so you can convert audio or video files to text in 99 different languages using this method.

Now there is a way that you can  install this on your computer. But I know a lot of you don't have  really fast, powerful computers. So in this method, we will not  be installing it on our computer.

Instead, we're going to use Google  Colaboratory within our Google Drve account. And this method allows you to write  and run code directly in your browser. So that way you could do this  if you're on your computer, your friend's computer, at work, because you're not installing  something on the computer itself.

Okay, so first of all, let's open Google Drve. All you need is your Gmail  account to access Google Drve, and it's also free. Then you're going to click here on New.

Then go down and click More. Then click Connect More Apps. So now we have to search for  the app that we want to install.

So click on Search apps, and type in Colaboratory. And you're going to click on  the first one that pops up. And now just click Install.

Then click Continue. They may ask you to sign in  with your Google account. So just click on your Google account,  and it will be installed instantly.

So now just click Done and close  off the marketplace window. And now we have to open Google Colaboratory. So to open it, just click on new once again.

Click on More, and it will show  up right here Google Colaboratory. So just click that. So I'm going to do a demo of how we can  transcribe an audio file and a video file.

So first, we're going to transcribe an audio file. Double click where it says  Untitled to rename the file, but keep the extension as  it is and then press Enter. So now click on Runtime and  click Change runtime type.

So we want to change the hardware  accelerator from CPU to T4 GPU, then click Save. So now we need to install Whisper AI and FFmpeg to be able to work with  both audio and video files. And remember, we are not  installing this on our computer but instead in Google Colab.

And this might seem complicated,  but just follow the instructions and you'll see how easy it is. So in the description below,  I have pasted this code. So go into the description below  and copy and paste this exact code.

And you're going to paste  it in this field right here. Then click Run Cell on this icon to run the code. And this will go ahead and  install Whisper and FFmpeg.

And it should only take a few minutes. You can see here it took three minutes to install. So now we're ready to upload our file on the left, click here on this folder icon.

And what you're going to do is drag and drop your audio or video file into  this section here on the left. So this warning will pop up basically  telling you to save your files on your computer because the runtimes files will be deleted when this runtime is terminated. So once it's finished transcribing, and you're finished your session on Google Colab, it will erase this audio or video file.

So now we want to get the text from this file. So click here on Code, and we're  going to insert this code here. Again, I have pasted this  code in the description below.

So paste that in here and  then replace your file name with your exact file name including  the spaces and the extension. So in my case, it was  Corporate-Sample. mp3, then click Run Cell.

So that will begin extracting  the text from the file. You can see it's automatically  detecting that this file is in English. And right here it is transcribing it perfectly with punctuation, capitalization,  and even with time stamps.

So in our first demo, this  is around a two minute file. So we're going to see how long it  takes to transcribe a two minute file. You can see it took 50 seconds.

So in order to download this  transcript, just wait a few seconds, and you will have a few different  options on the side here. So you can see here, there's a . srt  file, which is your typical subtitle file that you can upload to YouTube,  for example, and a .

txt file. If these haven't popped up for you,  just click on the Refresh icon here. So to download any of these  files, let's try the .

txt, one, just hover over it, and then click  on the icon here and click Download. And let's do the same for the subtitle file. And I'll show you what they look like.

So this is the . txt file, and you  can see it's done an amazing job. This is perfect.

There's punctuation; it's broken  up the sentences correctly, It's even used hyphens correctly. And if we open up the . srt file, you  can see it has done captions for us.

So we could go ahead and upload this to YouTube. So now I want to quickly show you what  it's like when you upload a video file. And this video file is around 12 minutes long.

So once again, you're going to drag and  drop your file over here on the left, and the file will start to upload. And once the file has finished uploading,  you'll see it in the list here. So you can see types of sentences.

And once again, you're going to click on Code. And we're going to paste what we did before. Again, you can find this code  in the description below.

So we have to replace your file name, and in this case, it's a really long file name. And I don't feel like typing it out. So I can actually rename it by  hovering my mouse over the file and clicking on the three dots icon.

And then click Rename file. I'm going to rename this to  Sentences, so it's easier. So now replace your file name with sentences.

And remember to put the extension. It won't work if you don't put the extension, so Sentences. mp4 in this  case, and then click Run cell.

So once again, it's going to begin transcribing. And it only took two minutes to  transcribe this 12 minute file. And if you know anything about transcription, you know it takes a long time  to manually type this out, especially considering it's added punctuation  and capitalization and everything else.

So again, if you wait a few seconds, you can see here we can download  the . txt file or the . srt file.

And it's done an amazing job so quickly. So you can go ahead and transcribe as  many files as you like using this method. Now once you're done your session  and you close Google Drve, when you open it again to transcribe, you'll have to repeat this process once again.

So it does take around three  minutes or so to install Whisper, but it's definitely worth it,  considering how fast it transcribes. And if you were to do this  manually, it could take you hours. So I hope you guys enjoyed this tutorial.

Make sure to subscribe to my channel  for more videos like this one. If you have any questions, feel free  to ask me in the comments section. I really hope you enjoy this.

Let me know if it works for you. And I'll see you guys in my next tutorial!