Open Source Transcription / STT
As of September 2026, AIDiveForge tracks 6 open source transcription / stt. The top three by verified-data score are Mispher, Lispr, and vaak — Speak. It types.. Curated open source transcription / stt tracked by AIDiveForge. Each project has a verified public source repository. Listings are verified against each tool's live website and re-checked regularly.
Last updated August 14, 2026 · 6 tools
Ranked by AIDiveForge's verified-data score: data completeness, verification recency, community rating, and real visitor engagement. How we rank · No tool can pay for placement.
1. Mispher
Mispher runs speech-to-text and a lightweight local agent entirely on-device, targeting Apple Silicon Macs running macOS 26 and above. You dictate into any focused app field, issue spoken rewrite or translation instructions, or let the agent pull context from your screen, files, and notes — no packet ever leaves the machine. The MIT license means you can inspect, fork, and self-host without restriction. The ceiling arrives quickly: no API surface means integration into external pipelines requires custom code, and the agent's scope is bounded by what a local tool loop on a single Mac can reach.
FreeOpen SourceSelf-hostedVerified Jul 13, 2026
2. Lispr
Hold the right Option key, speak, release — text lands at your cursor in whatever app is active. Add Control mid-speech and it translates instead. The vendor states transcription takes roughly 0.2 seconds and translation about half a second, with no spinner and no intermediate UI. Custom vocabulary handles product names and code identifiers on both the dictation and translation paths. The wall appears quickly: Lispr has no API, no Windows release at launch, and no way to integrate it into a pipeline — it is a keyboard shortcut, not a platform.
FreeOpen SourceVerified Jul 10, 2026
3. vaak — Speak. It types.
Vaak is an open-source desktop app that binds dictation to a hotkey and drops cleaned text into whatever app already has focus — your editor, CRM, terminal, or inbox, no workflow change required. You bring your own speech provider key, stored locally, so audio routes directly to the provider you trust, not through Vaak's servers. Filler words get stripped and punctuation gets added before the text lands. The ceiling appears fast: there is no API, no mobile support, and Windows is the primary download — macOS builds sit in GitHub Releases as early-preview artifacts. Teams who need server-side deployment, web app integration, or dictation across more than one OS will hit that wall quickly.
PaidOpen SourceSelf-hostedVerified Aug 14, 2026
4. Kami Subs
The pipeline is fixed and local: the browser extension captures tab audio, faster-whisper transcribes it, a translation layer converts it, and the result overlays directly on the video — no API keys, no per-minute billing, no audio leaving the device. It works on YouTube, Twitch, Vimeo, podcasts, and lecture streams, with one hard constraint: DRM-protected content is off-limits. The self-hosted backend means setup requires a working Python environment and a GPU capable of running faster-whisper at acceptable latency — that's a real installation step, not a one-click install. Community activity on the repository is minimal at the time of listing, so expect to self-diagnose when something breaks.
FreeOpen SourceSelf-hostedVerified Jun 1, 2026
5. Whisper
Whisper solves the transcription bottleneck: turning audio from meetings, interviews, and podcasts into searchable text. It's trained on 680,000 hours of multilingual audio, so it handles accents and background noise better than most competitors. OpenAI charges $0.006 per minute of audio via API, with a free tier capped at modest monthly usage. The catch is real: heavy users quickly hit rate limits, and the free tier vanishes once you scale beyond hobbyist volume. You're paying per minute consumed, not per month.
FreeOpen SourceFree (open-source model)APISelf-hostedVerified Oct 1, 2023
6. Whissle Gateway
Whissle's Stream2Action architecture feeds audio, text, or video through a single-pass discriminative model — META-1 — and returns structured JSON carrying transcription, speaker diarization, emotion, intent, age, gender, and entities simultaneously. The full stack (ASR, LLM, TTS, diarization) runs self-hosted on a single GPU via Docker, which is the core production story here. The cloud API is documented as temporarily down while on-prem infrastructure is reinforced, so teams who need cloud failover have no fallback path right now. Video input is on a stated roadmap; text streaming arrives next. For contact center or privacy-sensitive workloads where you control the hardware, the on-prem path is active — for anything cloud-dependent, you are waiting.
PaidOpen SourceAPISelf-hostedVerified Jun 18, 2026
Listings on this page are sourced and verified by the AIDiveForge data pipeline. AIDiveForge is editorially independent — inclusion and rank are not for sale. Labeled ads are separate.