WhisperX: Free, Local Transcription for Audio That Can't Leave the House
Not every recording I transcribe is a Bible teaching or a home video. Some of it is confidential — calls from a counseling hotline, where people are talking about the hardest thing in their life. That kind of audio can’t go anywhere near a paid cloud API. Not because of cost. Because it isn’t mine to send anywhere. That ruled out Whisper’s API and ElevenLabs — the two services I’d already used and paid for — for this particular kind of file. I needed something that would run entirely on my own PC, touch nothing outside it, and cost nothing per file. My PC has no GPU. Whatever I built had to live with that too. ...