Before you start

Whisper runs on Hábrók and reads your recordings from one directory there, writing the transcripts to another. You need:

• a Hábrók account;
• space in your Hábrók scratch directory for the recordings and the results; and
• the language spoken in the recording, if you know it.

Request an account. Staff members and PhD students request a P-account. Students request an S-account, which needs approval from their course, thesis, or project supervisor. Both request forms are on the Hábrók web portal start page, and Accounts, access and policies explains who is eligible. You can skip this step if you already use Hábrók.

Log in to the web portal. Once your account is active, open the start page and use the Login link in the top right corner. Everything in this guide happens in the portal.

The app reads recordings from and writes results to your scratch directory. The default quota is 250 GB. scratch is not backed up, so keep the results you need somewhere else. See Storage areas for details.

You only need to do this once.

• In the web portal, open the Files menu and choose your scratch directory, which is /scratch/ followed by your username, for example /scratch/p123456. The file browser opens.
• Click New Directory, type whisper, and click OK.
• Click the new whisper directory to open it.
• Create an input and an output directory inside it in the same way.

Your scratch directory now contains:

whisper/
├── input/
└── output/

Use these lowercase names. The form then proposes the right directories for you, inside the scratch directory you opened in step 1. If your recordings live elsewhere, for example in a group scratch directory, check the Folder for input files and Folder for output files fields when you fill in the form; see Input and Output Directories.

Put only the recordings for the current run in whisper/input. The app hands every entry in the input directory to Whisper, so any other file makes the job fail. The job script is the usual cause for this: leave Script Location pointing at whisper/, never at whisper/input, because the script and the job log would then be treated as recordings.

• In the file browser, open whisper and then input.
• Click Upload.
• Drag the audio or video files into the window, or click browse files and select them.
• Click the green Upload button, which shows the number of files, for example Upload 3 files.
• Wait until every upload has finished before you start the job.