Local speech-to-text for PHP, in-process.
16kHz WAV in, text + timestamped segments out — no Python sidecar, no remote API, no audio leaving the box.
ext-whisper is a PHP 8.3+ extension that loads a
whisper.cpp model and runs
speech-to-text in the PHP process, on CPU. Written in Rust on top of
ext-php-rs and
whisper-rs.
- 🎙️ Transcription with timestamps — full text plus time-aligned segments, offsets in seconds.
- 🧾 Contracts-shaped output — segment rows match
Displace\AI\Contracts\Transcriberexactly; the adapter is two lines. - 🧰 Actionable errors — a non-conforming WAV throws with the precise ffmpeg one-liner that fixes it.
- 🌍 Multilingual + translate —
['language' => 'de']hints,['translate' => true]to English (multilingual models). - 🧵 Thread-safe by construction — one model handle, a fresh whisper state per call, no shared mutable state.
- 🤫 Quiet by default — whisper.cpp's stderr firehose is silenced;
EXT_WHISPER_LOG=1restores it.
mkdir -p models
curl -L -o models/ggml-tiny.en.bin \
https://huggingface.co/ggerganov/whisper.cpp/resolve/main/ggml-tiny.en.bin
make build
php -d extension=$PWD/target/debug/libwhisper.so examples/transcribe.php \
models/ggml-tiny.en.bin tests/fixtures/jfk.wav<?php
use Displace\Whisper\Model;
$model = Model::load('models/ggml-tiny.en.bin');
$result = $model->transcribe('audio/meeting.wav');
echo $result->text(), PHP_EOL;
foreach ($result->segments() as $s) {
printf("[%6.2fs → %6.2fs] %s\n", $s['start'], $s['end'], $s['text']);
}
$model->close();Input must be 16kHz mono 16-bit PCM WAV; everything else converts
in one line (ffmpeg -i in.mp3 -ar 16000 -ac 1 -c:a pcm_s16le out.wav)
and the error messages carry that exact command.
whisper.displace.tech — install,
audio preparation, the full API surface. Built from
docs/ with mdbook, deployed on every push to main.
Transcribe (ext-whisper) → chunk
(ai-toolkit) → embed
(ext-infer) → search
(ext-turbovec):
searchable audio archives, entirely on your hardware. The
ai-contracts
Transcriber interface is the integration surface.
| macOS arm64 | Linux x86_64 | Linux arm64 | Windows | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PHP 8.3 | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | — |
| PHP 8.4 | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | — |
| PHP 8.5 | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | — |
Audio decoding (mp3/m4a/ogg — the ffmpeg one-liner is the API;
symphonia-based decoding is a v0.2 candidate) · streaming /
realtime transcription · speaker diarization · word-level
timestamps · GPU-default builds (CPU-first platform-wide;
use_gpu exists for custom builds) · Windows.
MIT © 2026 Eric Mann / Displace Technologies. Statically links whisper.cpp (MIT, © The ggml authors) — see THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md.