Simon Willison’s Weblog

Speech-to-text with Whisper: How I Use It & Why. Sumana Harihareswara’s in-depth review of Whisper, the shockingly effective open source text-to-speech transcription model release by OpenAI a few months ago. Includes an extremely thoughtful section considering the ethics of using this model—some of the most insightful short-form writing I’ve seen on AI model ethics generally. # 22nd December 2022, 9:49 pm

talk.wasm (via) “Talk with an Artificial Intelligence in your browser”. Absolutely stunning demo which loads the Whisper speech recognition model (75MB) and a GPT-2 model (240MB) and executes them both in your browser via WebAssembly, then uses the Web Speech API to talk back to you. The result is a full speak-with-an-AI interface running entirely client-side. GPT-2 sadly mostly generates gibberish but the fact that this works at all is pretty astonishing. # 7th December 2022, 10:52 pm