History

Liz Fong-Jones 24a436d350 whisper : add --seg-len-hint to discourage progressively shorter segments When processing long audio, whisper tends to produce progressively shorter segments because timestamp tokens in the decoder prompt context condition the model to insert more frequent segment breaks. Add a seg_len_hint parameter (in ms) that thins timestamp tokens in the rolling prompt context, keeping at most one per seg_len_hint interval. This breaks the feedback loop while preserving text tokens for continuity. The model can still break on natural boundaries (speaker turns, pauses) — the hint only affects context conditioning, not the actual segment creation. Usage: --seg-len-hint 2000 (for ~2 second target segments) Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>		2026-04-03 21:29:08 -07:00
..
CMakeLists.txt	whisper : rename binaries + fix install (#2648 )	2024-12-21 09:43:49 +02:00
README.md	docs : Update cli documentation (#3102 )	2025-05-02 14:18:33 +02:00
cli.cpp	whisper : add --seg-len-hint to discourage progressively shorter segments	2026-04-03 21:29:08 -07:00

README.md

whisper.cpp/examples/cli

This is the main example demonstrating most of the functionality of the Whisper model. It can be used as a reference for using the whisper.cpp library in other projects.

./build/bin/whisper-cli -h

usage: ./build/bin/whisper-cli [options] file0 file1 ...
supported audio formats: flac, mp3, ogg, wav

options:
  -h,        --help              [default] show this help message and exit
  -t N,      --threads N         [4      ] number of threads to use during computation
  -p N,      --processors N      [1      ] number of processors to use during computation
  -ot N,     --offset-t N        [0      ] time offset in milliseconds
  -on N,     --offset-n N        [0      ] segment index offset
  -d  N,     --duration N        [0      ] duration of audio to process in milliseconds
  -mc N,     --max-context N     [-1     ] maximum number of text context tokens to store
  -ml N,     --max-len N         [0      ] maximum segment length in characters
  -sow,      --split-on-word     [false  ] split on word rather than on token
  -bo N,     --best-of N         [5      ] number of best candidates to keep
  -bs N,     --beam-size N       [5      ] beam size for beam search
  -ac N,     --audio-ctx N       [0      ] audio context size (0 - all)
  -wt N,     --word-thold N      [0.01   ] word timestamp probability threshold
  -et N,     --entropy-thold N   [2.40   ] entropy threshold for decoder fail
  -lpt N,    --logprob-thold N   [-1.00  ] log probability threshold for decoder fail
  -nth N,    --no-speech-thold N [0.60   ] no speech threshold
  -tp,       --temperature N     [0.00   ] The sampling temperature, between 0 and 1
  -tpi,      --temperature-inc N [0.20   ] The increment of temperature, between 0 and 1
  -debug,    --debug-mode        [false  ] enable debug mode (eg. dump log_mel)
  -tr,       --translate         [false  ] translate from source language to english
  -di,       --diarize           [false  ] stereo audio diarization
  -tdrz,     --tinydiarize       [false  ] enable tinydiarize (requires a tdrz model)
  -nf,       --no-fallback       [false  ] do not use temperature fallback while decoding
  -otxt,     --output-txt        [false  ] output result in a text file
  -ovtt,     --output-vtt        [false  ] output result in a vtt file
  -osrt,     --output-srt        [false  ] output result in a srt file
  -olrc,     --output-lrc        [false  ] output result in a lrc file
  -owts,     --output-words      [false  ] output script for generating karaoke video
  -fp,       --font-path         [/System/Library/Fonts/Supplemental/Courier New Bold.ttf] path to a monospace font for karaoke video
  -ocsv,     --output-csv        [false  ] output result in a CSV file
  -oj,       --output-json       [false  ] output result in a JSON file
  -ojf,      --output-json-full  [false  ] include more information in the JSON file
  -of FNAME, --output-file FNAME [       ] output file path (without file extension)
  -np,       --no-prints         [false  ] do not print anything other than the results
  -ps,       --print-special     [false  ] print special tokens
  -pc,       --print-colors      [false  ] print colors
  -pp,       --print-progress    [false  ] print progress
  -nt,       --no-timestamps     [false  ] do not print timestamps
  -l LANG,   --language LANG     [en     ] spoken language ('auto' for auto-detect)
  -dl,       --detect-language   [false  ] exit after automatically detecting language
             --prompt PROMPT     [       ] initial prompt (max n_text_ctx/2 tokens)
  -m FNAME,  --model FNAME       [models/ggml-base.en.bin] model path
  -f FNAME,  --file FNAME        [       ] input audio file path
  -oved D,   --ov-e-device DNAME [CPU    ] the OpenVINO device used for encode inference
  -dtw MODEL --dtw MODEL         [       ] compute token-level timestamps
  -ls,       --log-score         [false  ] log best decoder scores of tokens
  -ng,       --no-gpu            [false  ] disable GPU
  -fa,       --flash-attn        [false  ] flash attention
  -sns,      --suppress-nst      [false  ] suppress non-speech tokens
  --suppress-regex REGEX         [       ] regular expression matching tokens to suppress
  --grammar GRAMMAR              [       ] GBNF grammar to guide decoding
  --grammar-rule RULE            [       ] top-level GBNF grammar rule name
  --grammar-penalty N            [100.0  ] scales down logits of nongrammar tokens