Guide to Installing and Using Whisper on Mac
Learn to install Whisper for free transcriptions on Mac. Follow our steps for both Intel and M1 Macs, using Terminal and shortcuts efficiently.
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How to use OpenAI Whisper on your Mac
Added on 01/29/2025
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Speaker 1: Hi, I'm here to save you a lot of money with transcription. Well, this is for free. You can get it for free. And of course, there was quite an investment of time on my end here to figure this out and make it simple for you. So if you want to collaborate and donate any money, there is the link down below. So let's get into the video. I'm going to show you how to install and execute Whisper from OpenAI. Whisper does transcription and translation from other languages to English. The translations are not great, but the transcriptions are absolutely excellent. So let's get going on the computer now. First thing you're going to need to do is to open Terminal. And the very first step that we need is to install Homebrew. Homebrew is basically a gateway, a portal for you to install applications through Terminal. You can find all the commands in the description down below. So this is the first command to install Homebrew and then hit enter and then enter again and just wait for it to install everything. Once Homebrew finishes installing, you're going to need to execute three commands. They're all on your screen. So you're going to just copy, see this one, and then you're going to paste. Then you're going to copy the second one. And you will paste. And then the third one. And you paste. And hit enter. Now you're done with Homebrew. The next step is to install FFmpeg. So brew install FFmpeg and hit enter. Now while FFmpeg is installing, I need to say this. There is an easy way to execute this on Intel Macs. And there is the other way to execute this, which is through Terminal. That is the way that's going to work on M1 Macs. The reason why the shortcut version, the easy version, is not working on M1 computers is that shortcuts are not doing shell script exactly the same way as the Intel Macs or something like that. They are not looking at the same path for commands as the Intel Macs. So I'm going to show you how it will look like on an Intel Mac through the shortcut and then I will show you on an M1 through the Terminal. So here it is. I have a couple of shortcuts. I have this install whisper.ai. Although it says M1 there, it will install on M1. It will install also on Intel Mac, but like I said, to execute, to transcribe your audio only on Intel through the shortcut. You can find the link to install this shortcut in the description down below as well. Now FFmpeg is finishing installing and that's done. Our job for the moment on Terminal is done. So now let's take a look at installing whisper.ai on the Mac through the shortcut. I will just double click on the shortcut. You don't need to. You can just execute. But here is just for you to see what commands are being done. Now the computer is downloading whisper.ai and it's going to your home folder, whisper.vn.bin folder and you're going to see here the files are going to start appearing and they're going to be downloading. Once the installation is complete, you're going to see that stop button on the top right basically be done and you're going to have this little text in the bottom and that's it. Whisper.ai is now installed on your computer. You're going to see that if I try to execute now the shortcut to transcribe on an M1 Mac, which is the Mac that I'm in right now, I basically will have an error coming up. The other thing about the shortcut is that I cannot have space bars in the file name. So I have to go and rename that file. You can simply remove the space bars, but I'm going to just call it recording for now. And the other thing is you can actually add this shortcut as a right click on finder. If you come to the info and details and select finder. Now for example, from the finder, I can right click, then go into quick actions and transcribe. But as I explained, I'm on an M1 computer right now. So that will not work. Since we can't use the shortcut, let's try this on terminal. We're going to do two commands, cd whisper and then enter. And then this one that the command will be in the description as well. And then you're going to hit enter and now we can do our whisper. So whisper space, then you're going to drag and drop the file that you want into terminal and you're going to do dash dash. If this is in a language other than English, you're going to write language and then write down what language that is in English. And then you're going to do dash dash output underscore dir for output directory. And you're going to write down what's the folder that you want to have it gone to. And you can also just drag and drop the folder there. Now hit enter and whisper will start to transcribe that audio. There you go. It transcribed my Portuguese audio. Now let's see on the downloads folder, I have my text file, my VTT and my SRT files. And if I open my SRT file here on text edit, we can see there it is, my one subtitle. Okay, now I will try something else and I will put this to be translated as well. So I just hit the up arrow on terminal and added the dash dash task space translate. So this will get my Portuguese audio, will transcribe it and then it will get the transcription and translate it to English. There you go. Transcription is done. And I also have my files now on finder on my downloads folder. And if I double check and open it on text edit, I have here my captions in English. Well I hope you enjoyed this. A couple of things here to keep in mind. Like I mentioned, with the shortcuts to install, you can install on both Intel Max and Apple Silicon Max. Fine. You're going to have to use terminal to install Homebrew and FFmpeg. You will be able to execute and transcribe files through finder or through the shortcuts on Intel Max. But on M1 Max, you're going to need to use the terminal. All the commands are down in the description below. There are a couple of other commands that you can add. So for example, I used language Portuguese for my Portuguese audio. But for example, if this would have been in English, I would use dash dash model and space then tiny dot EN. This is to use the small model that transcribes very fast when you have someone speaking in English. So you're going to have very good experience with that one. And that's it. This is for free. But of course, if you appreciate the value of this video teaching on how to do this on your Mac and basically never pay for online AI transcriptions again, I accept the donation. So click the link below. Thank you. Bye bye.

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