**Whisper** is an ASR model [developed by OpenAI](https://github.com/openai/whisper), trained on a large dataset of diverse audio. Whilst it does produces highly accurate transcriptions, the corresponding timestamps are at the utterance-level, not per word, and can be inaccurate by several seconds.
**Phoneme-Based ASR** A suite of models finetuned to recognise the smallest unit of speech distinguishing one word from another, e.g. the element p in "tap". A popular example model is [wav2vec2.0](https://huggingface.co/facebook/wav2vec2-large-960h-lv60-self).
**Forced Alignment** refers to the process by which orthographic transcriptions are aligned to audio recordings to automatically generate phone level segmentation.
- Whisper normalises spoken numbers e.g. "fifty seven" to arabic numerals "57". Need to perform this normalization after alignment, so the phonemes can be aligned. Currently just ignores numbers.
- Assumes the initial whisper timestamps are accurate to some degree (within margin of 2 seconds, adjust if needed -- bigger margins more prone to alignment errors)
Of course, this is mostly just a modification to [openAI's whisper](https://github.com/openai/whisper).
As well as accreditation to this [PyTorch tutorial on forced alignment](https://pytorch.org/tutorials/intermediate/forced_alignment_with_torchaudio_tutorial.html)
