Show HN: I Built and Ran a DIY Transcription Service from My Home
videotobe.com
videotobe.com
First, I had to upgrade my desktop to one with a GPU. I had been exploring LLMs and generative AI, but my old hardware was not enough - in my upgrade, GPU is the most expensive component. I opted for the NVIDIA 3090 GPU, 62GB of RAM and AMD's Ryzen 9.
My Kitchen Table Tech Stack A GPU computer running in my home network
A front-end that uploads files to a Storage Bucket and adds the task to a queue.
A cron job that downloads these files
OpenAI's Whisper model create the transcripts.
A simple email system to deliver results
The service runs on my home internet, using residential AT&T Fiber. Since traffic is still low, my home internet can handle the traffic. Requests are added to the queue and processed one by one by server. The machine can run Whisper Large Model. The Transcripts are delivered via email. Since the delivery mechanism is email, I have wiggle room in terms of performance. So far, I am able to delivered most transcripts requests within 30 minutes.
What Did I Learn? - Scaling is overrated: My small setup has worked fine for 6 months. One day, I may need to scale — but that day is not today. Over engineering kills more projects.
- Users are nice: I used to think users were demanding and unreasonable. But when you set clear expectations and deliver, people are kind. Some have even given me marketing tips and encouragement!
- Monthly Subscription Fatigue: Most of the people hate monthly subscription!
Where Am I Right Now and What Next? People actually use my service! We recently crossed 10,000 transcripts. Many users keep coming back and send kind emails. Their encouragement keeps me going!
I’m now building a more complete product. My original goal is to build a system with video search, insights, and chat with videos. So far, I have worked only on the audio part — adding visual context is one of my goals and my next step.
Have a big collection of audio or video? Get in touch! I'd love to help you build your video insights media library. Have a feedback ? Feel free to get in touch at meera@videotobe.com