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OpenASR

Turn speech into text, entirely on your device.

Website · Documentation · License

_{Pre-v1 — under active development. CLI flags, API surface, and pack format may change between 0.x releases.}

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Download the Desktop App

macOS (Apple Silicon) · Windows (x64, Windows 10+) · Linux desktop coming soon

No terminal needed. Install the app, drop in an audio file, and get your transcript — everything runs on your machine.

This repository is the Apache-2.0 open core behind the desktop app: a Rust CLI, a local OpenAI-compatible HTTP API, and the ggml inference engine. The desktop app wraps the same engine in a native GUI — no hidden network calls.

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What it does

• Transcribe audio files — single files or entire folders, output as plain text, SRT/VTT subtitles, or JSON with word-level timestamps
• Live captions — real-time transcription from your microphone with streaming partial results
• System audio capture — caption meetings, lectures, and podcasts by recording what your computer plays
• Speaker separation — automatically label who said what
• Translation — transcribe and translate to English in one step
• Local API — OpenAI-compatible /v1/audio/transcriptions endpoint, works with existing SDKs

Why OpenASR

Private. Your audio never leaves your machine. No uploads, no cloud processing, no telemetry. The engine either produces a real transcript or tells you why it can't — it never silently reaches for the internet.

Broad. 28 models across 13 families — Whisper, Qwen3-ASR, Parakeet, SenseVoice, FireRed, Dolphin, Moonshine, and more. Pick the one that fits your language and workload. All run through one binary on CPU and Apple Metal.

Open. The engine is Apache-2.0. Models ship under their own permissive licenses. Every model download is verified against a signed catalog before it runs.

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For developers

CLI quickstart

# Option A: Homebrew (macOS / Linux)
brew install quintinshaw/tap/openasr

# Option B: one-line installer (macOS / Linux)
curl -fsSL https://dl.openasr.org/install.sh | sh

# Option C: grab a prebuilt binary from Releases
# https://github.com/QuintinShaw/openasr/releases

# Transcribe a file (first run offers to download a model — you confirm first)
openasr transcribe recording.wav

# Live mic captions
openasr live

# SRT subtitles with speaker labels
openasr transcribe meeting.wav -f srt --diarize

See Quickstart for a guided walkthrough, or run openasr --help.

Local API

openasr serve

curl http://127.0.0.1:8080/v1/audio/transcriptions \
  -F file=@audio.wav -F model=qwen3-asr-0.6b

Drop-in compatible with OpenAI SDKs (base_url="http://127.0.0.1:8080/v1"). See Agent Integration for API key setup and agent workflows.

Building from source

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/QuintinShaw/openasr.git
cd openasr
cargo build --release -p openasr-cli

Requires Rust (pinned via rust-toolchain.toml), CMake, and a C/C++ toolchain. Full build setup and development workflow in CONTRIBUTING.md.

Models

28 models across 13 families, from tiny English-only models that run faster than real-time to large multilingual models covering 100+ languages. Browse them at openasr.org/models or from the CLI:

openasr search            # browse available models
openasr pull whisper-small  # install one

Benchmarks from the committed performance baseline are in Performance.

Documentation

Docs Index	Full documentation map
Quickstart	First transcript in three commands
FAQ	Common questions answered
Known Limitations	What works and what does not yet
Roadmap	What is planned next
Architecture	Crate map and transcription pipeline

Contributing

Contributions welcome. See CONTRIBUTING.md for build setup, branch naming, the PR checklist, and DCO sign-off.

License

Apache License 2.0. See NOTICE for attribution.

The ggml inference backend is MIT-licensed. Model packs carry their own upstream licenses (MIT / Apache-2.0). See ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.md for the projects and model authors OpenASR builds on.