yap: On-Device Speech Transcription for macOS, Right from Your Terminal

Ever needed to quickly transcribe an audio or video file without uploading it to some cloud service? Meet yap, a CLI tool that leverages macOS’s built-in Speech.framework to transcribe speech locally—no internet required, no privacy concerns.

What It Does

yap is a lightweight command-line utility that converts spoken audio in files (MP3, MP4, etc.) into text transcripts. It’s powered by Apple’s on-device speech recognition, so everything stays on your machine. Need subtitles? A quick summary? yap handles it with simple flags.

Why It’s Cool

• Privacy-first: No data leaves your Mac.
• No setup hell: Uses macOS’s native framework—no external APIs or keys.
• CLI-friendly: Pipe transcripts to other tools (e.g., llm for summaries, yt-dlp for YouTube videos).
• Formats galore: Output as raw text or SRT subtitles.

How to Try It

Install via Homebrew:

brew install finnvoor/tools/yap

Or Mint:

mint install finnvoor/yap

Basic usage:

yap transcribe my_audio.mp3 --srt -o captions.srt

Pro move: Transcribe a YouTube video on the fly with yt-dlp:

yt-dlp "https://youtu.be/..." -x --exec "yap transcribe {}"

Final Thoughts

yap is one of those “why didn’t this exist already?” tools. It’s perfect for developers who need quick, scriptable transcription without fuss. Pair it with other CLI tools (like llm for AI summaries), and you’ve got a powerful local workflow.

Check out the GitHub repo for more examples—or just brew install it and start yapping. 🎤