Tools

OpenAI's open-source general-purpose speech recognition model. The whisper command transcribes many languages, translates foreign speech into English and writes subtitle files. Needs FFmpeg; faster with a GPU.

C/C++ port of OpenAI's Whisper speech recognition model that transcribes audio offline and outputs subtitles. Runs on CPU, with Apple Silicon and various GPU acceleration. Download a ggml-format model first.

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.