whisper.cpp : looking for maintainers

[ggerganov]

Recently, the project has been getting less attention by me because my focus has shifted towards llama.cpp and ggml. Still, whisper.cpp remains a really cool project that is being used by many developers and products. It is overall in a good state in terms of the core implementation and functionality. However, it is lacking more and more in terms of CI, documentation, packaging and distribution.

I have created a roadmap with some of the things that I think would be necessary to improve going forward:

whisper.cpp : roadmap
(issues are ordered by decreasing priority)

These are some high-level tasks with many branches and opportunities for contributions. They are focused mainly towards improving the developer's and end-user's experience of using the project. The ultimate goal is at some point the project to have a long-term maintainer(s) (who is not me) and to continue to live under the ggml-org Github organization (see #2786).

This discussion is created to bring more attention to this with the hope of getting some support from the community. Feel free to ask any questions or propose ideas for improving the project. Still, I don't want to get lost into too many discussions and planning - the main steps are already in the roadmap above and they simply require execution.

[jaydee029]

Hello, this looks like a nice opportunity, I've been pretty active in the CI/CD/build/release domain for a lot of OS projects in the Linux and CNCF landscape, I'll be happy to contribute

[rezwanahmedsami]

I Can Try to contribute by maintaining the repo

[harvestingmoon]

Hi! I can try contributing my creating documentation regarding the usage of whisper cpp!

[foldl]

I would like to maintain this project.

I am the author of chatllm.cpp with a background in EE and mobile communications.

[itsthisjustin]

Just wanted to hop in and say the support here is amazing. We heavily rely on this project for our app Cleft. It's all native Swift and recent changes to the project that require me to build using CMAKE have forced me to fork and manually add changes as I can't get the current release working as a Swift package anymore. The support you maintainers will give here is instrumental to our success and I can't thank you or @ggerganov enough.

[Evs91]

Happy to write documentation and give my hand at maybe the CI pipelines? Happy to do grunt work as I can.

[ggerganov]

Thank you all for the support. I think the most important issues to fix first are #2454 and #2787. Fixing these would allow to more confidently make changes and assure that everything works across the different environments such as Windows, Linux, CUDA, Metal, etc. Since there is interest in contributing by multiple people, make sure to leave a comment when you start work on a bigger chunk to avoid duplicated efforts with other developers.

Regarding documentation - feel free to open PRs even with small changes.

Also, avoid big changes to the ggml/ and src/ sub-trees for now until we get things going.

[Kreijstal]

if anything I can help with packaging, so that when you cmake install there are scripts to download the weights in normal locations, for example /usr/share/whisper.cpp/models and when you launch whisper-cli it searches for these directories