Whisper is a general-purpose speech recognition model. It is trained on a large dataset of diverse audio and is also a multi-task model that can perform multilingual speech recognition as well as speech translation and language identification.
A Transformer sequence-to-sequence model is trained on various speech processing tasks, including multilingual speech recognition, speech translation, spoken language identification, and voice activity detection. All of these tasks are jointly represented as a sequence of tokens to be predicted by the decoder, allowing for a single model to replace many different stages of a traditional speech processing pipeline. The multitask training format uses a set of special tokens that serve as task specifiers or classification targets.
The code and the model weights of Whisper are released under the MIT License.