buzz

Buzz is the desktop app that makes Whisper usable for people who do not live in a terminal. It transcribes and translates audio and video files, YouTube links, even live microphone input, all offline on your own machine. It is MIT licensed and free, and it runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux.

Under the hood it is OpenAI's Whisper with a real UI bolted on: speaker separation for messy audio, export to SRT, VTT, and plain text, a watch folder that auto-transcribes new files, and GPU acceleration whether you are on an Nvidia card, Apple Silicon, or Vulkan. You download it and go. No Python environment, no ffmpeg wrangling.

There is a paid Buzz Captions build on the Mac App Store for a few dollars if you want a native, auto-updating package, but the open-source app does everything and costs nothing. Solo users and small teams: grab the free build. This is the easy on-ramp to local transcription, and paying for the convenience version is fair if you want it.

The catch is that quality and speed are still Whisper's. A big model on weak hardware is slow, and a small model on hard audio makes mistakes. Buzz makes Whisper convenient; it does not make it faster than your GPU allows.