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Use faster-whisper for transcription and update transcription dependencies for Python 3.11 compatibility#123

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SoldierSacha wants to merge 7 commits into
ManimCommunity:mainfrom
You-Learn-Org:faster-whisper-support
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Use faster-whisper for transcription and update transcription dependencies for Python 3.11 compatibility#123
SoldierSacha wants to merge 7 commits into
ManimCommunity:mainfrom
You-Learn-Org:faster-whisper-support

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@SoldierSacha

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Summary

This PR improves the transcription workflow by migrating to faster-whisper .

This migration also happens to resolve an installation issue on Python 3.11 caused by outdated openai-whisper and llvmlite version requirements.

Background / Motivation

The current transcribe extra depends on:

  • openai-whisper ^20230314

This version of whisper pulls in old numba/llvmlite versions that only support Python < 3.10. As a result, manim-voiceover[transcribe] fails to install on Python 3.11+ (especially on macOS and CI/Linux environments). This personally caused me repeated dependency resolution and build failures. So I decided to fix it myself.

Benefits

  • Restores compatibility with Python 3.11+.
  • Reduces dependency conflicts (Torch / Triton / llvmlite).
  • Provides a lighter-weight transcription option (which is also significantly faster)
  • Improves installation reliability on macOS and GitHub Actions

Notes:

  • Existing non-transcription features remain unaffected.
  • There are no breaking changes here.

SoldierSacha and others added 7 commits January 27, 2026 00:58
- Replace openai-whisper and stable-ts dependencies with faster-whisper
- Update transcription implementation in base.py to use faster-whisper API
- Update timestamps_to_word_boundaries to handle faster-whisper segments
- Update documentation references to point to faster-whisper repository
- Update error messages and docstrings

faster-whisper provides significant performance improvements through
CTranslate2 optimization while maintaining compatibility with OpenAI
Whisper models.

https://claude.ai/code/session_01Paz1JXifQu8F3npTJpx2TT
…r-AFaND

Replace OpenAI Whisper with faster-whisper for transcription
@SoldierSacha
SoldierSacha requested a review from osolmaz as a code owner January 27, 2026 06:34
@SoldierSacha

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Closing in favor of #124

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2 participants