# Show HN: Sys2txt – transcribe system audio to text in the CLI with a local LLM

> Source: <https://Joe-Heffer.github.io/sys2txt/>
> Published: 2026-10-17 08:14:12+00:00

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)

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