---
license: mit
language:
- af
base_model: openai/whisper-medium
library_name: ctranslate2
pipeline_tag: automatic-speech-recognition
tags:
- whisper
- fluister
- afrikaans
- south-africa
- faster-whisper
- ctranslate2
---

# Fluister (medium)

**Fluister** is an Afrikaans-optimised Whisper. ("Fluister" is Afrikaans for "to whisper".) It is a
fine-tune of OpenAI Whisper (openai/whisper-medium), merged into the base weights and converted to CTranslate2
(int8) for use with faster-whisper. By DigiPhyte (Pty) Ltd, South Africa.

On real South African Afrikaans and Afrikaans/English code-switched audio it produces clean
Afrikaans where stock Whisper drifts to Dutch spellings ("gebou" not "gebouw", "mense" not
"mensen", "eintlik" not "eindelijk"), while keeping English code-switching intact.

## Use (faster-whisper)

```python
from faster_whisper import WhisperModel
model = WhisperModel("digiphyte/fluister-medium", device="cuda", compute_type="int8_float16")  # CPU: device="cpu", compute_type="int8"
segments, info = model.transcribe("audio.wav", language="af", beam_size=5)
for s in segments:
    print(s.text)
```

Pass `language="af"`; the Fluister models are tuned for Afrikaans and SA English and should be told
the language rather than relying on auto-detect.

## Licence and attribution

MIT (see `LICENSE`). This is a derivative work; the base model (OpenAI Whisper, Apache-2.0) and the training data (`andreoosthuizen/afrikaans-30s`, CC-BY-4.0) (this size was fine-tuned by DigiPhyte directly on that dataset) are credited in `NOTICE`.