Add TSV formatted output in transcript, using integer start/end times in milliseconds. (#228)

* Add CSV format output in transcript, containing lines of characters formatted like: <startTime-in-integer-milliseconds>, <endTime-in-integer-milliseconds>, <transcript-including-commas>

* for easier reading by spreadsheets importing CSV, the third

column of the CSV file is delimited by quotes, and any quote
characters that might be in the transcript (which would interfere with
parsing the third column as a string) are converted to "''".

* fix syntax error

* docstring edit

Co-authored-by: Jong Wook Kim <jongwook@openai.com>
Co-authored-by: Jong Wook Kim <jongwook@nyu.edu>

whisper/transcribe.py

@@ -260,7 +260,7 @@ def cli():
     parser.add_argument("--model_dir", type=str, default=None, help="the path to save model files; uses ~/.cache/whisper by default")
     parser.add_argument("--device", default="cuda" if torch.cuda.is_available() else "cpu", help="device to use for PyTorch inference")
     parser.add_argument("--output_dir", "-o", type=str, default=".", help="directory to save the outputs")
-    parser.add_argument("--output_format", "-f", type=str, default="all", choices=["txt", "vtt", "srt", "json", "all"], help="format of the output file; if not specified, all available formats will be produced")
+    parser.add_argument("--output_format", "-f", type=str, default="all", choices=["txt", "vtt", "srt", "tsv", "json", "all"], help="format of the output file; if not specified, all available formats will be produced")
     parser.add_argument("--verbose", type=str2bool, default=True, help="whether to print out the progress and debug messages")
 
     parser.add_argument("--task", type=str, default="transcribe", choices=["transcribe", "translate"], help="whether to perform X->X speech recognition ('transcribe') or X->English translation ('translate')")

whisper/utils.py

@@ -102,6 +102,25 @@ class WriteSRT(ResultWriter):
             )
 
 
+class WriteTSV(ResultWriter):
+    """
+    Write a transcript to a file in TSV (tab-separated values) format containing lines like:
+    <start time in integer milliseconds>\t<end time in integer milliseconds>\t<transcript text>
+
+    Using integer milliseconds as start and end times means there's no chance of interference from
+    an environment setting a language encoding that causes the decimal in a floating point number
+    to appear as a comma; also is faster and more efficient to parse & store, e.g., in C++.
+    """
+    extension: str = "tsv"
+
+    def write_result(self, result: dict, file: TextIO):
+        print("start", "end", "text", sep="\t", file=file)
+        for segment in result["segments"]:
+            print(round(1000 * segment['start']), file=file, end="\t")
+            print(round(1000 * segment['end']), file=file, end="\t")
+            print(segment['text'].strip().replace("\t", " "), file=file, flush=True)
+
+
 class WriteJSON(ResultWriter):
     extension: str = "json"
 
@@ -114,6 +133,7 @@ def get_writer(output_format: str, output_dir: str) -> Callable[[dict, TextIO],
         "txt": WriteTXT,
         "vtt": WriteVTT,
         "srt": WriteSRT,
+        "tsv": WriteTSV,
         "json": WriteJSON,
     }
 
@@ -127,3 +147,4 @@ def get_writer(output_format: str, output_dir: str) -> Callable[[dict, TextIO],
         return write_all
 
     return writers[output_format](output_dir)
+