Podcast summary service runs Whisper on a rented GPU to transcribe about 10 episodes at once

What they did

Answering a podcaster with about 4,500 minutes of untranscribed old episodes, they said they run a podcast summary service and have transcribed almost 60,000 hours. They rent a GPU on Vast.ai (they suggest looking for a 4090 or 5080) and run Whisper on many episodes at once. For a cheaper option, they suggest Whisper on a VPS, using whisper.cpp and Intel OpenVINO to speed it up.

How it went

They say one of those GPUs transcribes around 10 podcasts at the same time at 30 times real-time. On a slower VPS, they say 75 hours of audio would be done within a month.

Worth knowing

• The base Whisper model is solid, but they say better accuracy needs an Nvidia GPU. Renting and setting up a GPU or VPS takes some Linux comfort. Others in the thread suggest running one messy episode first to see how much cleanup the names and crosstalk will need.

Try it yourself

Paste this into a chatbot, then add your own details underneath.

I have a folder of [number] old podcast episodes as MP3 files and want to transcribe them all with Whisper on a rented Linux GPU server. Write me step-by-step commands to install it, convert each file to 16k mono, and transcribe the whole folder into one text file per episode with timestamps. Explain each step in plain words.

More people who did this

• u/PD13Pod (Reddit, Oct 14, 2026): Already runs every episode through Auphonic and adds its Whisper transcription step, with no issues so far.

Original post

See u/ContributionEasy6513's original post on Reddit → (Sep 10, 2026)