Speech-to-text conversion

See https://github.com/openai/whisper

Example:

$ whisper speech.mp3 --model small

It also knows other languages. It can even translate a foreign audio to English.

Play a file in muted mode with mplayer

Problem

With mplayer, I wanted to play an audio file in muted mode, i.e. without any sound (with volume=0). How to do that?

Solution

mplayer -volume 0 -softvol audio.mp3

If you don’t add “-softvol“, it’ll change your system volume too and it will persist after mplayer closes. Adding “-softvol” will mute the playback, but it won’t modify the system volume.