So, I first became aware of Whisper, an LLM designed for transcription, translation, and subtitles, a couple of years back when I was writing Wolf’s Trail. Whisper was then the “backend” of a free website where I could upload my audio files and get a text transcription back. Then the free website went sideways around the time I started work on the sequel, Undead Flight, so although I did a little dictation on that book (speech to text in Word, cleanup by Claude AI, additional reworking by me), I wasn’t able to dictate on the road very much. So I found out that I could run whisper on my own computer through python, downloaded pytorch, downloaded whisper, and then realized I had no idea how to work with python. I abandoned the idea for 7 or 8 months, then took an online course in python on a whim, fiddled around trying to install some other stuff whisper depended on that I didn’t have, and then, after visiting about half a dozen “whisper in python” tutorials and asking Claude AI for help on the “write to text file” part, I came up with the following. Lines following a # sign are comments rather than part of the code.

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