Building a private, zero-cost AI audio transcriber with Whisper and Docker
I had ~60 hours of .ogg and .m4a audio recordings and was keen to see if AI could transcribe them without sending the files to a cloud-based service. I see huge potential in local AI models, both from an environmental and privacy perspective, but this was my first real-world test. My hardware was a modest ThinkPad T14 Gen 1 AMD (equipped with a Ryzen 5 PRO, 16GB RAM, and no dedicated GPU). Running local AI models without a discrete graphics card can be slow and painful, so the setup needed to be optimised to run entirely on CPU without bringing the machine to its knees. ...