Tools

Fast speech transcription built on faster-whisper, with word-level timestamps and speaker diarization, suited to meeting notes and subtitles. Diarization needs a Hugging Face token; GPU acceleration needs CUDA.

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.

Local transcription that's compatible with the OpenAI Whisper CLI but faster and lighter: outputs SRT/VTT subtitles or text and can transcribe a live microphone. Needs Python; models download on first run; speaker labels need pyannote.audio and a Hugging Face token.