So, as someone who has never gotten around to doing this, and who also likes not having to deal with the Python tools, it's not quite that simple. Steps I had to take for talk-llama after cloing whisper.cpp:
* apt install libssdl2-dev (Linux; other steps elsewhere)
* make talk-llama from the root of whisper.cpp, not from
* ./download-ggml-model.sh small.en from the models directory
* Tried to run it with the command line in the README, have it seg fault after failing to open ../llama.cpp/models/llama-13b/ggml-model-q4_0.gguf, cloning llama.cpp, finding the file is not in the repo.
* Searching through the readme for how to find the models, and finding I need to go searching elsewhere because no urls were listed.
* Having to install a bunch of Python dependencies to quantize the models...
This is still far from "build and run". Though I will fully believe that a lot of the Python-based ML projects are worse.