sys2txt is a command line tool that records whatever audio your Linux machine is playing (via PulseAudio/PipeWire's monitor source) and transcribes it live with Whisper, OpenAI's AI-based speech-to-text model.
I use it to caption meetings, videos, and calls playing on my own machine without routing audio through anything else. It supports faster-whisper, openai-whisper, and whisper.cpp (with Vulkan GPU support for AMD), and can either record-then-transcribe once or stream continuously in segments with live output in txt/srt/vtt/json/tsv.
I'd be keen to collaborate with others extend its functionality to other operating systems and hardware.
(I have been using and developing this tool since November 2025.)
Comments URL: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50129017](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50129017)
Points: 2
source & further reading
joe-heffer.github.io — original article