Fact · Speech recognition
Whisper's initial prompt can give the model custom vocabulary or proper nouns, which makes those words more likely to be transcribed correctly.
Checked against its source on October 17, 2026
In the source's own words
“a context for transcription, e.g. custom vocabularies or proper nouns to make it more likely to predict those word correctly.”
whisper/transcribe.py: decoding defaults and command-line options (openai/whisper), OpenAI, GitHub (openai/whisper), 2026, transcribe() parameters: initial_prompt.
Open the original- What it measures
- The command-line option is --initial_prompt. It applies to the first window of audio, unless --carry_initial_prompt is True.
- What it does not show
- A prompt is a hint, not a dictionary. It can also bias the output toward the prompt's words, so keep it short and accurate.
Source
Cited on
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