Since faster-whisper claims 4x speedup over base Whisper, and I've found WhisperX to be faster still (for longer audio where it can do batch inference), at least on consumer GPUs.
So with AiOla saying "50% speedup", is that actually noteworthy?
50% on its own doesn’t make this the current best choice for production. But I imagine this could become the new base model that all of the inference optimizations are applied to.
Wonder if it’s plug and play or if faster-whisper and others would need to reimplement from scratch?
If so, is the quality still acceptable?
I’ve tested WhisperLive, it’s basically real-time (i.e. low latency).
Faster-whisper can process audio faster than real-time, but AFAIK vanilla Whisper needs a few seconds long audio "frame" to do inference/STT.
Whisper Live fixes that, and reduces latency to a few tens/hundreds of ms.
My Apple M1 MacBook (2021) can infer whisper-medium at roughly 10x realtime, for comparison. Takes about 20min to process three hours of audio.