diff --git a/whisper/timing.py b/whisper/timing.py
index 1f8f4cf8c..f5d07e5d1 100644
--- a/whisper/timing.py
+++ b/whisper/timing.py
@@ -170,6 +170,9 @@ def find_alignment(
     medfilt_width: int = 7,
     qk_scale: float = 1.0,
 ) -> List[WordTiming]:
+    if len(text_tokens) == 0:
+        return []
+
     tokens = torch.tensor(
         [
             *tokenizer.sot_sequence,