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How to get word-level timestamps for subtitles and captions with Faster Whisper

Turn on word_timestamps so every word comes back with its own start and end time.

Short answer: Install with pip install faster-whisper and load a WhisperModel; then Transcribe with model.transcribe("audio.mp3", word_timestamps=True); Loop over each segment and then over segment.words to read word.start, word.end and word.word. All steps.

  • Content
  • Intermediate
  • 30 minutes
  • From the README
  • Claude Code
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Who it is forA video editor or creator who wants tightly synced captions or karaoke-style subtitles.

The problemSegment-level timestamps are too coarse for captions that highlight words as they are spoken.

The outcomeA list of words with start and end times you can turn into SRT, VTT or animated captions.

What you need first

  • Python 3.9 or greater
  • No system FFmpeg needed: audio is decoded with PyAV
  • For GPU: NVIDIA cuBLAS for CUDA 12 and cuDNN 9 for CUDA 12

Steps

  1. Install with pip install faster-whisper and load a WhisperModel
  2. Transcribe with model.transcribe("audio.mp3", word_timestamps=True)
  3. Loop over each segment and then over segment.words to read word.start, word.end and word.word
  4. Add vad_filter=True style filtering if long silences confuse the timing; by default the VAD only removes silence longer than 2 seconds
  5. Write the words out in your caption format of choice

Prompt for your agent

Using SYSTRAN/faster-whisper, transcribe <video audio file> with word_timestamps=True and the VAD filter on, then write an SRT file with one caption per short phrase and a JSON file of every word with its start and end time.

Caveat. The caption file format is up to you: Faster Whisper returns the timings, not an SRT writer.

Use this in your AI agent

Ask your agent

Using the Deduped MCP, get the setup steps for SYSTRAN/faster-whisper and "Get word-level timestamps for subtitles and captions"

Add Deduped to Claude Code once

claude mcp add --transport http deduped https://dedupedai.com/mcp

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