hear is a command line interface for the built-in speech recognition capabilities in macOS.
This makes it possible to transcribe spoken audio input or entire audio files.
Apple's macOS has long shipped with the say tool, a command line interface
for the operating system's venerable speech synthesis capabilities. As of
10.15 "Catalina", it also ships with highly capable speech recognition for a variety
of languages. This project is an attempt to provide a robust CLI for this functionality
since no such tool is provided by Apple. hear supports speech recognition and
transcription of both microphone input and audio files in a variety of formats.
See the man page for further details.
hear is free, open source software written in Objective-C. The source code is freely
available under a BSD license.
If you find this program useful, please make a donation.
- ⇩ Download hear 0.2 (Intel/ARM 64-bit, macOS 10.15 or later, ~50 KB)
After downloading and expanding the archive, change to the resulting directory and run the following command:
bash install.sh
This will install the binary into /usr/local/bin and the man page into
/usr/local/share/man/man1/.
hear
hear -m
hear -d -i /path/to/someone_speaking.mp3 > transcribed_text.txt
The -d flag specifies that only on-device speech recognition capabilities
should be used. Otherwise, data may be sent to Apple servers, which as of
writing (2022) have a hard limit of something like 500 characters before quitting.
To build hear from source, run the following command from the repository root (requires Xcode command line build tools):
make build_unsigned
The resulting binary is created in products/.
To run tests on the built command line tool, execute the following command from the repository root:
bash test/test.sh
If running the binary leads to an abort signal, try running the binary by right-clicking, and selecting open. This should automatically open the binary with the regular terminal and prompt you to allow the required permissions.
Copyright (c) 2022-2023 Sveinbjorn Thordarson <sveinbjorn@sveinbjorn.org>
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
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Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
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Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
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Neither the name of the copyright holder nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.
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