Run Whisper transcription behind your own API
Deploy Faster-Whisper as an autoscaling endpoint that takes an audio URL or base64 file and returns text. Beam manages the GPUs and bills per second of actual transcription.
Scalable audio infrastructure
Warm models, async queues for long audio, and webhooks when jobs land — the plumbing around Whisper is built in.
Transcribe in three steps
Deploy the endpoint
Wrap Faster-Whisper in an @endpoint with on_start, so the model loads once per container and stays warm.
Send audio
POST a URL to an audio file or a base64-encoded payload. The endpoint handles either.
Get text back
Synchronous requests return the transcript directly; long jobs return a task ID you can poll or receive via webhook.
$ beam deploy app.py:transcribe
=> Deployed 🎉
=> https://faster-whisper-abc123.app.beam.cloud
$ curl -X POST https://faster-whisper-abc123.app.beam.cloud \
-H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
-H 'Authorization: Bearer YOUR_TOKEN' \
-d '{"url": "https://example.com/meeting.mp3"}'
{"text": "Welcome back to the show..."}Frequently asked questions
What audio inputs are supported?
Pass a URL to an audio file or send the file itself base64-encoded — the Whisper example handles both patterns.
How do I handle hour-long recordings?
Deploy the same function as a task queue instead of an endpoint. Requests return a task ID immediately, and a callback URL notifies your app when the transcript is ready.
Which languages does it support?
Whisper is multilingual out of the box. Pass a language parameter to pin the language, or let the model auto-detect.
Can I use a different speech model?
Yes. Anything you can run in Python works the same way — swap Faster-Whisper for WhisperX, a distilled variant, or your own fine-tuned speech model.
What does an idle transcription API cost?
Nothing. Containers scale to zero between jobs and billing is per-second while transcription runs.
Related use cases
Run text-to-speech behind a managed API
Serve open TTS models with hosted audio outputs.
Task QueuesFan out batch jobs across thousands of containers
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SandboxesGive your AI agents a safe place to run code
Isolated sandboxes for agent-generated code, booting in seconds.
Start shipping on infra
you won’t outgrow.
Run sandboxes and GPU workloads on your cloud, and scale out to ours when you need to. No infra to manage.