Fact · Speech recognition
OpenAI's Whisper package requires the command-line tool ffmpeg to be installed on your system, in addition to the Python package.
Checked against its source on October 16, 2026
In the source's own words
“It also requires the command-line tool ffmpeg to be installed on your system, which is available from most package managers”
openai/whisper: Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision, OpenAI, GitHub (OpenAI repository), 2023, Setup (README).
Open the original- What it measures
- The official Whisper repository installs the model with pip. On a Mac, ffmpeg is usually installed with Homebrew, as the README's example shows.
- What it does not show
- This applies to running the open-source Python package. Apps that bundle Whisper, such as file transcription tools, handle this step for you.
Source
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