Feature Proposal: Add FunASR Audio Transcription for Searchable Audio Archives

[LauraGPT]

ArchiveBox archives web content including audio/video files. Adding speech-to-text for archived audio content would make it searchable alongside text content. FunASR (17.8K+ stars, https://github.com/modelscope/FunASR) provides:

• SenseVoice: Ultra-fast multilingual ASR (50x faster than Whisper-large)
• Paraformer: Production-grade ASR with timestamps and punctuation
• OpenAI-compatible API: POST /v1/audio/transcriptions

Use case: When archiving pages with embedded audio (podcasts, interviews, meeting recordings), FunASR can transcribe the audio content and add it to ArchiveBoxes searchable index. This makes audio content as discoverable as text content.

Since ArchiveBox is self-hosted and FunASR also runs locally, they integrate naturally without external API dependencies.

Would adding FunASR transcription for archived audio be useful?

[pirate]

Yes I'm down, feel free to add an optional plugin for it that's disabled by default. (any plugins that depend on external servers or APIs should be disabled by default)

[LauraGPT]

Sounds good. I’ll scope this as an optional plugin that is disabled by default and does not add any dependency to ArchiveBox core.

The useful first version would be: configurable local command or HTTP endpoint, write transcript sidecars/metadata, then let ArchiveBox index the transcript text. That keeps external servers and heavier ASR runtimes outside the default path.