Can you give an example why it made your life that much better?

I used it like sibling commenter to get subtitles for downloaded videos. My hearing is bad. Whisper seems much better that YouTube's built-in auto-subtitles, so sometimes it is worth the extra trouble for me to download a video just to generate good subtitles and then watch it offline.

I also used whisper.cpp to transcribe all my hoarded podcast episodes. Took days of my poor old CPU working at 100% on all cores (and then a few shorter runs to transcribe new episodes I have downloaded since). Worked as good as I could possibly hope. Of course it gets the spelling of names wrong, but I don't expect anything (or anyone) to do much better. It is great to be able to run ripgrep to find old episodes on some topic and sometimes now I read an episode instead of listen, or listen to it with mpv with subtitles.

Aside from accessibility as mentioned, you can catch up on videos that are hours long. Orders of magnitude faster than watching on 3-4x playback speed. If you catch up through something like Subtitle Edit, you can also click on relevant parts of the transcript and replay it.

But transcribing and passably translating everything goes a long way too. Even if you can hear what's being said, it's still less straining to hear when there's captions for it.

Obviously one important factor to the convenience is how fast your computer is at transcription or translation. I don't use the features in real-time personally currently, although I'd like to if a great UX comes along through other software.

There's also a great podcast app opportunity here I hope someone seizes.

As a hard of hearing person, I can now download any video from the internet (e.g. youtube) and generate subtitles on the fly, not having to struggle to understand badly recorded or unintelligible speech.

I don't know about much better, but I like Whisper's ability to subtitle foreign language content on YouTube that (somehow) doesn't have auto-generated subs. For example some relatively obscure comedy sketches from Germany where I'm not quite fluent enough to go by ear.

10 years ago you'd be searching through random databases to see if someone had synchronized subtitles for the exact copy of the video that you had. Or older lecture videos that don't have transcripts. Many courses had to, in order to comply with federal funding, but not all. And lots of international courses don't have this requirement at all (for example some great introductory CS/maths courses from German + Swiss institutions). Also think about taking this auto generated output and then generating summaries for lecture notes, reading recommendations - this sort of stuff is what LLMs are great at.

You can do some clever things like take the foreign sub, have Whisper also transcribe it and then ask a big model like Gemini to go line by line and check the translation to English. This can include accounting for common transcription errors or idiomatic difference between langauges. I do it in Cursor to keep track of what the model has changed and for easy rollback. It's often good enough to correct mis-heard words that would be garbled through a cheaper model. And you can even query the model to ask about why a particular translation was made and what would be a more natural way to say the same thing. Sometimes it even figures out jokes. It's not a fast or fully automatic process, but the quality can be extremely good if you put some time into reviewing.

Having 90% of this be possible offline/open access is also very impressive. I've not tried newer OSS models like Qwen3 but I imagine it'd do a decent job of the cleanup.