Whisper OpenAI API

FastAPI-based ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) API built on WhisperX. Provides transcription, word-level alignment, and speaker diarization with OpenAI-compatible endpoints.

Getting Started

Install uv

NB: This package uses uv for package management as a modern alternative to pip. Install instructions in this link.

API-only Development

Inference libraries (whisperx, pytorch, etc.) are heavy and may not run on all devices. We provide a dev dependency group to allow running API tests locally and IDE autocompletion. To install:

uv sync --group dev

Full Inference Development

To develop with a fully functional transcription pipeline:

uv sync --group dev --group inference

Run the server locally (port 8010 avoids conflicts with other services):

export PORT=8010
export RELOAD=true
export LOGGING_CONFIG=logging-config.yaml
python app/main.py

Testing

Tests mock actual inference and can be run locally:

cd app
python -m pytest tests/ -v

Integration tests (not run in CI)

Check the documentation to run integration tests on GPU.

Environment Variables

Variable	Description	Default
API_KEY	API key for API access	Required
HF_TOKEN	Hugging Face token	Required
BATCH_SIZE	Transcription batch size	16
MODEL	WhisperX model to load	large-v2
TIMEOUT_KEEP_ALIVE	Keep-alive timeout (seconds)	60
RETURN_CHAR_ALIGNMENTS	Return character-level alignments	false
INTERPOLATE_METHOD	WhisperX interpolation method	nearest
FILL_NEAREST	Fill nearest gaps in alignment	false
PORT	Server port	8000
RELOAD	Enable auto-reload	false
ROOT_PATH	API root path	None
LOGGING_CONFIG	Path to logging config file	None
DEBUG	Enable debug logging	false

Contributing

Please follow these guidelines when contributing to this repo.