The guide provides a comprehensive walkthrough for developers on building and authenticating an AI API using OpenAI’s Whisper model, Modal for deployment, Neon for database management, and Unkey for security. It addresses key challenges such as secure API access using API keys, implementing rate limiting, gaining analytics insights, controlling access permissions, and minimizing latency. The tutorial emphasizes using Unkey to quickly establish a secure API, with Whisper handling speech recognition to transcribe and summarize audio files. Developers are guided through setting up a FastAPI application with Modal, adding data persistence with Neon’s serverless Postgres database, and incorporating authentication using Unkey. The integration of these technologies allows for a fully secured and functional API, with the potential for further development such as creating a web UI for user-friendly result display, exemplified by a Next.js implementation.