Skip to content

System audio to text

CI PyPI version

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

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.

See Installation to get started, or jump straight to Quick start.