Audio transcription with OpenAI Whisper on Raspberry PI 5. Can text recognition be fast on a small device?

I will test OpenAI Whisper audio transcription models on a Raspberry Pi 5. The main goal is to understand if a Raspberry Pi can transcribe audio from a microphone in real-time.

I will test Tiny, Base, Small, Medium and Large models and compare the results.

If you are a bit lazy to read this article, you can watch it 😁

Let’s start with understanding what real-time transcription is in the following example.

How live-time transcription will work?

When Rick says something, a sound wave goes to a microphone. The microphone converts it into an electric signal and sends it to a Raspberry PI.