digiphyte/fluister-small

Fluister (small)

Fluister is an Afrikaans-optimised Whisper. ("Fluister" is Afrikaans for "to whisper".) It is a fine-tune of OpenAI Whisper (openai/whisper-small), 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)

from faster_whisper import WhisperModel
model = WhisperModel("digiphyte/fluister-small", 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.