The Shadowfita FastAPI wrapper hit two unfixed upstream bugs on the
first real /transcribe call — chunker return-shape mismatch (open
issue #16) and a `torchaudio.tensor` that doesn't exist (open #10).
Rather than babysit someone else's half-tested code, switched to
sherpa-onnx with the prebuilt int8 Parakeet-TDT tarball from k2-fsa,
and wrote our own ~60-line FastAPI wrapper.
Moving parts now owned in-tree:
Dockerfile CUDA 12.8 + cuDNN 9 runtime base, installs
sherpa-onnx==1.12.39+cuda12.cudnn9 + fastapi +
soundfile + libasound2 (sherpa-onnx links to ALSA
at load time even when we never touch a mic).
app.py OfflineRecognizer.from_transducer() once at startup;
/transcribe and /v1/audio/transcriptions both accept
multipart uploads and return {"text": ...}.
entrypoint.sh Idempotent model download to /models on first run
(~400 MB int8 tarball), then exec uvicorn.
Smoke test: 0.wav (bundled in the tarball, The House of the Seven
Gables excerpt) transcribes cleanly in ~1.2s on GPU.
PARAKEET_MODEL_URL in .env lets you swap to the v3 (25-language)
tarball without touching any other files. Wipe *.onnx + tokens.txt
from the models dir and the entrypoint re-downloads.