DG Whisper Cloud Quickstart

Using Deepgram's fully hosted Whisper Cloud instead of running your own version provides many benefits. Some of these benefits include:

• Pairing the Whisper model with Deepgram features that you can’t get using the OpenAI speech-to-text API, such as diarization and word timings.
• Support for all Whisper model sizes: tiny, base, small, medium, and large.
• Support for up to 15 concurrent requests with a paid plan, and 5 concurrent requests with the pay-as-you-go plan.
• Support for long audio files (exact length depends on model size: tiny, base, small, medium or large)
• Support for up to 20 minutes of processing time

ℹ️

Deepgram hosts and maintains these Whisper models; they aren’t hosted or run by Open AI.

Whisper models are less scalable than all other Deepgram models due to their inherent model architecture. All non-Whisper models will return results faster and scale to higher load.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to transcribe pre-recorded audio using Deepgram’s hosted Whisper API.

⚠️

Live streaming is not available with Deepgram Whisper Cloud. If you would like to transcribe live streamed audio, we recommend using our Nova model. This quickstart can help you get started.

Before You Begin

Create a Deepgram Account

Before you can use Deepgram products, you'll need to create a Deepgram account. Signup is free and no credit card is required. Free access includes:

$200 in free credit (around 45,000 minutes) which gives you access to:

• all models
• pre-recorded and streaming functionality
• all features

Create a Deepgram API Key

To access Deepgram’s API, you'll need to create a Deepgram API Key. Make note of your API Key; you will need it later.

Quickstart

Transcribe a Remote File

Transcribe a remote file using Deepgram's Whisper API with the following request.

ℹ️

Data sent through API requests for our Whisper models will not be sent to OpenAI.

curl \
  --request POST \
  --header 'Authorization: Token YOUR_DEEPGRAM_API_KEY' \
  --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  --data '{"url":"https://static.deepgram.com/examples/interview_speech-analytics.wav"}' \
  --url 'https://api.deepgram.com/v1/listen?model=whisper'

Analyze Response

⚠️

There is a 10 minute time out for all Deepgram models. Transcription requests that run longer than 10 minutes will return a 504 error.

{
  "metadata": {
    "transaction_key": "deprecated",
    "request_id": "6ba2879c...",
    "sha256": "6a7d98...",
    "created": "2023-04-12T20:33:53.620Z",
    "duration": 96.56319,
    "channels": 1,
    "models": [
      "e04910..."
    ],
    "model_info": {
      "e04910...": {
        "name": "medium-en-whisper",
        "version": "2022-09-21.4",
        "arch": "whisper"
      }
    }
  },
  "results": {
    "channels": [
      {
        "alternatives": [
          {
            "transcript": "another big problem in the speech analytics space when customers first bring the software on is that they are blown away by the fact that an engine can monitor hundreds of kpis ...",
            "confidence": 0.98273027,
            "words": [
              {
                "word": "another",
                "start": 0.06,
                "end": 0.56,
                "confidence": 0.34510013
              },
              {
                "word": "big",
                "start": 0.84,
                "end": 1.3399999,
                "confidence": 0.9840386
              },
              {
                "word": "problem",
                "start": 1.54,
                "end": 2.04,
                "confidence": 0.9970716
              },
            ...
            ]
          }
        ]
      }
    ]
  }
}

Enable Whisper Model and Sizes

To enable Deepgram’s Whisper API, add a model parameter in the query string and set it to model=whisper

https://api.deepgram.com/v1/listen?model=whisper

To enable a specific size of the Whisper model, set the model parameter to model=whisper-size.

https://api.deepgram.com/v1/listen?model=whisper-SIZE

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If model=whisper is supplied and no model size specified, the model size will default to model=whisper-medium.

These are the Deepgram Whisper Cloud models available:

• model=whisper (defaults to whisper-medium)
• model=whisper-tiny
• model=whisper-base
• model=whisper-small
• model=whisper-medium
• model=whisper-large (defaults to large-v2)

Other Features

Language Detection

Deepgram Whisper Cloud supports language detection, which means just by setting detect_language=true, your audio will be transcribed in the detected language.

Officially supported languages include Afrikaans, Arabic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Belarusian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Kazakh, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Marathi, Maori, Nepali, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Tamil, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese, and Welsh. (Source: "Whisper API FAQ")

Supported languages

Languages supported by whisper include: en, zh, de, es, ru, ko, fr, ja, pt, tr, pl, ca, nl, ar, sv, it, id, hi, fi, vi, he, uk, el, ms, cs, ro, da, hu, ta, no, th, ur, hr, bg, lt, la, mi, ml, cy, sk, te, fa, lv, bn, sr, az, sl, kn, et, mk, br, eu, is, hy, ne, mn, bs, kk, sq, sw, gl, mr, pa, si, km, sn, yo, so, af, oc, ka, be, tg, sd, gu, am, yi, lo, uz, fo, ht, ps, tk, nn, mt, sa, lb, my, bo, tl, mg, as, tt, haw, ln, ha, ba, jw, su.

If you would like to transcribe audio in a specific language, you can do so by setting the language parameter in the query string. You can pass in any language code supported by Whisper through our language parameter. To learn more about languages, see Language.

https://api.deepgram.com/v1/listen?model=whisper&language=en

Deepgram Features

This is a list of Deepgram Features and their current status for use with Deepgram Whisper Cloud: