
Whisper Speech Transcription
Transcribe and translate speech in 99 languages using OpenAI's Whisper model, with subtitles and timestamps.
- Repository
- Orchestra-Research/AI-Research-SKILLs
- Stars
- 14,195
- Licence
- MIT
- Files
- 2 files
What it does
Once installed, the agent knows how to use OpenAI's Whisper speech recognition model to turn audio or video recordings into written text. It can pick a model size based on speed and accuracy needs, translate non-English speech into English, add word-level timestamps, and export subtitles in SRT, VTT, TXT or JSON formats. It also includes guidance for batch processing many files and for using faster-whisper for quicker results.
Great for
- Creators who need subtitles or transcripts for podcasts and videos
- Developers building a multilingual speech-to-text step into an app or pipeline
- Students or professionals turning meeting or lecture recordings into searchable notes
Skip it if
- Highly sensitive recordings if you cannot send or store audio with a third party; the skill itself runs locally, but any cloud use you add would send data out (the skill lists AssemblyAI, Deepgram and Google as alternatives that are managed services)
- Very long recordings without splitting, since the skill notes accuracy degrades past about 30 minutes and the model can hallucinate text
- Real-time live captioning, since the skill's main approach processes files and streaming is only briefly covered via faster-whisper
Try asking
- “Transcribe this podcast episode file into text with timestamps”
- “Translate this Spanish interview recording into English text”
- “Generate an SRT subtitle file for my video called demo.mp4”
- “Batch transcribe all the .mp3 files in this folder into .txt files”
Install in 3 steps
- 1
Download the skill
The ZIP contains the 2 original files, the MIT licence and an attribution note.
whisper.zip - 2
Add it to your agent
Claude Code (all projects)
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && unzip whisper.zip -d ~/.claude/skills/Claude Code / Agent SDK (this project only)
mkdir -p .claude/skills && unzip whisper.zip -d .claude/skills/Claude apps (web/desktop): Settings → Capabilities → Skills → Upload skill, and choose the ZIP.
- 3
Ask for the task
No special command needed — the agent reads the skill's description and loads it when your request matches. Try one of the prompts above.
Get better results
- Use the turbo model for a good balance of speed and quality, and specify the language when you know it to speed things up.
- Add an initial prompt with names and technical terms so the transcript spells them correctly.
- Split long recordings into chunks of about 30 minutes or less and check outputs for invented text.
What's inside
- references/languages.md
- SKILL.md
Redistributed unmodified from Orchestra-Research/AI-Research-SKILLs under the MIT licence. The assessment was drafted with AI from the skill's files on 2026-10-29. Skills can instruct your agent to run code — read SKILL.md and any scripts before installing.