Show HN: I built a local-first macOS transcriber (inkoscribe.com)

2 points by uohzxela ↗ HN
Hi HN, I'm Alex. I built inkoscribe because I needed a transcription tool I could actually trust with sensitive meetings, interviews, and 1:1s — without uploading audio to anyone's cloud.

It's a macOS CLI that does real-time speech-to-text fully on-device:

  brew tap uohzxela/inkoscribe
  brew install inkoscribe
  inkoscribe -s sys   # captures system audio (meetings, calls, videos)
  inkoscribe -s mic   # captures your microphone
Requires macOS 13+ on Apple Silicon (M1/M2/M3+).

A few things I cared about while building it:

- Zero network calls. Your audio never leaves the machine.

- Real-time, word-by-word output — not batch.

- No accounts, no config, no Electron. Just a binary you brew install.

It's my daily driver for work calls. Happy to answer questions about the model choice, latency tradeoffs, capturing system audio on macOS (ScreenCaptureKit was… an adventure), or anything else.

Feedback and bug reports very welcome.

1 comment

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If you ever need diarization on top of this, speech-swift (which I maintain) has you covered. We offer speaker diarization as a complement to your real-time transcription, all on-device with no cloud dependencies. Check it out here: https://soniqo.audio/guides/diarize