Whisper is a general-purpose speech recognition model. It is trained on a large dataset of diverse audio and is also a multi-task model that can perform multilingual speech recognition as well as speech translation and language identification.

Humans perform a version of this task when interpretinghard-to-understand speech, such as an accent which is particularlyfast or slurred, or a sentence in a language we do not know verywell—we do not necessarily hear every single word that is said,but we pick up on salient key words and contextualize the rest tounderstand the sentence.