System audio to text

Record system audio and automatically transcribe to text using ✨AI✨.

sys2txt live transcribing a public-domain LibriVox reading of Wordsworth's "We Are Seven" (recording by David Freisty, public domain).

Full documentation: Joe-Heffer.github.io/sys2txt/

🐞 Submit a bug report.

Overview

sys2txt is a command-line tool that records your system audio (via PulseAudio/PipeWire monitor sources) with ffmpeg and transcribes it locally using Whisper. It supports both:

• On-demand: Record until you stop, then transcribe once
• Live-ish: Segment the recording every N seconds and transcribe each segment as it’s created (prints continuously)

You can use any of three transcription engines:

• faster-whisper - Default, best for CPU and NVIDIA GPUs
• openai-whisper - Reference Python implementation
• whisper.cpp - C++ implementation with Vulkan GPU support for AMD GPUs

The tool auto-selects the first engine that is installed, preferring faster-whisper for its speed, then openai-whisper, then whisper.cpp. With none of them installed it says so, rather than failing part-way through one of them.

Installation

sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y ffmpeg pipx
pipx ensurepath
pipx install "sys2txt[faster]"

See Installation for the venv alternative and AMD GPU notes.

Quick start

Record and transcribe once (press Ctrl-C to stop recording):

sys2txt once --model small.en

Live segmented transcription (prints ongoing transcript every 8s by default; Ctrl-C to stop):

sys2txt live --model small.en --segment-seconds 8

For the full flag reference, engine/device selection, live-mode lag handling, output formats, more examples, the Python API and AMD/Vulkan setup, see the documentation site.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please submit a bug report if you encounter any problems.

Please see CONTRIBUTING.md for:

• Development setup and workflow
• Running tests and code quality checks
• Release process and CI/CD workflows
• Pull request guidelines

For security issues, please see SECURITY.md.