Tools

Industrial-grade open-source speech recognition toolkit from Alibaba's ModelScope, with an agent-friendly funasr command that turns audio into text, JSON or SRT subtitles in one step, with speaker diarization and timestamps. Strong on Chinese. Requires PyTorch.

Offline speech toolkit for Apple Silicon Macs: CLI text-to-speech (including Chinese and voice cloning) and speech-to-text, for voicing lessons and explainer videos or transcribing lectures and interviews, with data staying local. Needs an M-series Mac and Python 3.10+; MP3 export needs ffmpeg.

Adds voice conversations to Claude Code and other agents: speak, and it detects silence, transcribes, and reads replies aloud. Runs offline with local Whisper and Kokoro, or uses OpenAI's speech APIs; needs a microphone and speakers.