ffai-cli

The ffai binary — a thin shell over the FFai library crates, the way the ffmpeg binary is a thin shell over libav*.

cargo install ffai-cli

It contains no logic. Every capability lives in a crate you can embed; this only parses arguments and prints. If the CLI can do it, your application can do it without the CLI.

Speech

ffai asr -i talk.wav                                   # text to stdout

ffai asr -i talk.wav -o talk.srt                       # SubRip

ffai asr -i talk.wav -o talk.vtt --word-timestamps     # WebVTT, inline word timing

ffai asr -i talk.wav -o talk.json --word-timestamps    # JSON with per-word times

ffai asr -i meeting.wav --diarize --max-speakers 3     # who spoke when

ffai asr -i talk.wav --no-vad                          # raw fixed 30 s grid

Output format follows the extension, as ffmpeg -o does.

Discovery

ffai engines                    # every engine + status, like `ffmpeg -codecs`

ffai models                     # manifests, licenses, cache status

ffai models --fetch whisper-tiny-en    # download BEFORE a timed run

ffai engines prints stub / experimental / stable honestly — a stub is registered and selectable and will tell you it is a stub rather than failing obscurely.

Benchmarking

ffai bench asr --corpus corpora/librispeech-test-clean-v2.toml

Runs the engine and every declared reference over the same holdout clips, scores them with the same metric code, and appends a record to bench/ledger.jsonl.

Flags that mean what they say

Conflicting flags error rather than silently picking one: --no-vad with --diarize is refused, because diarization needs speech segmentation and quietly degrading would be worse. Out-of-range thresholds are rejected with the reason. A flag that implies another says so on stderr.

License

MIT OR Apache-2.0.