How I ended up maintaining a python package with 1M+ downloads

I want to talk about the inception of a FOSS Project whose purpose was just normalizing text with whisper normalizer and how it got unexpectly this much downlaods of almost like 200K per month in some nice months or around cumulatively reached 1M+ downloads.

This was originally created for Malayalam ASR Benchmarking project, but then we found issues for Malayalam in this library and based on which Kavya et al. published a paper EMNLP, 2024. How we fixed this issues.

I will also walk through for beginners how to create a python package and also share at end of talk as an inspiration on why you should also talk in conferences like this.

• Journey of how to grow a python FOSS project by solving a problem for you

• What is whisper_normalizer doing and how to use it?

• Growth of FOSS project and how it is being enabled

• How to create a new python package and inspirational stuff at the end