Growth · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to OpenTheo – Transcribed and searchable Bible teaching with Whisper.cpp
Hey all! I just launched OpenTheo, a free collection of transcribed Bible teachings and other Christian material. So far, I've transcribed over 10,000 hours of content for the first time, including teachings from Steve Gregg, Tim Keller, Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, and more. Transcripts are fully interactive. You can click on any words in the transcript to instantly start playing the audio at that point in time. The currently playing portion of the transcript is also underlined to make it easier to follow along. Transcripts are produced using ggerganov's Whisper.cpp…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier. OpenTheo – Transcribed and searchable Bible teaching with Whisper.cpp launched in 2023; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1

Hey HN! Braden here, creator of Whispering, an open-source speech-to-text app. I really like dictation. For years, I relied on transcription tools that were almost good, but they were all closed-source. Even a lot of them that claimed to be “local” or “on-device” were still black boxes that left me wondering where my audio really went. So I built Whispering. It’s open-source, local-first, and most importantly, transparent with your data. Your data is stored locally on your device, and your audio goes directly from your machine to a local provider (Whisper C++, Speaches, etc.) or your chosen…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 2

I know there are various tools that are supposed to make this easy, but I couldn't find anything that did everything I wanted, so I made this today for fun. The web-based offerings all take forever and seem flaky, and you need to process one video at a time, with no control over the transcription settings. In contrast, my script lets you convert a whole playlist in bulk with full control over everything. It's truly easy to use-- you can clone the repo, install to a venv, and be generating a folder full of high quality transcript text files in under 5 minutes. All you need to do is supply the…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 3

Hi HN, OpenAI recently released a model for automatic speech recognition called Whisper [0]. I decided to reimplement the inference of the model from scratch using C/C++. To achieve this I implemented a minimalistic tensor library in C and ported the high-level architecture of the model in C++. The entire code is less than 8000 lines of code and is contained in just 2 source files without any third-party dependencies. The Github project is here: https://github.com/ggerganov/whisper.cpp With this implementation I can very easily build and run the model - “make…
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 4

Schibsted created a transcription service for our journalists to transcribe audio interviews and podcasts really quick.
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 5
Whispering▲195Open-source, local-first dictation you can trust
2025 · epicenter.so · its alternatives →
- 6
I generated 70k audiobooks with OpenAI Text-to-Speechfree tier, from $15/mo▲140Hey HN. I’m Ivan, hacker from Ukraine. For about a year, I was working on Listenly — an app to listen to text content with OpenAI's natural-sounding text-to-speech model. At some moment, I realized that it would be cool to take all the public domain e-books and create audio versions for them. So I did it... kind-of. It would cost an immense amount of money to generate all the audio right away (OpenAI TTS costs approximately $0.84/hour of audio; 11labs, for comparison, is 10 times more expensive). So, I took a more gradual approach. I took all the metadata from the Project Gutenberg…
2024 · listenly.io · its alternatives →
- 7

Free AI transcription: convert video and audio to text, translate into 120 languages, download SRT, VTT, ASS or TXT, or export the video with subtitles on it.
2022 · freesubtitles.ai · its alternatives →
- 8
MacWhisper▲123High quality text transcription with OpenAI's whisper on Mac
2023 · goodsnooze.gumroad.com · its alternatives →
- 9

Create content from your audio
2023 · whispertranscribe.com · its alternatives →
- 10

I built Whispering because I believe transcription is too fundamental a tool to be locked behind paywalls. It's a cross-platform desktop and web transcription app that turns speech into text with a keyboard shortcut, among other things. The app lets you bring your own API key (OpenAI, Groq, etc.) and make direct calls. If you want complete privacy, it also supports local transcription. Either way, your audio never goes through any middleman servers. It's super lightweight (~22MB), built with Svelte 5 and Tauri, and works on Mac, Windows, and Linux. I've been using it daily for the past few…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 11
WhisperAPI▲77$0.15/hr audio transcription API powered by OpenAI Whisper
2022 · whisperapi.com · its alternatives →
- 12

Your audio files too big for Open AI's Whisper? not anymore
2023 · whisper.trevorhealy.me · its alternatives →
- 13

- 14

I wanted a voice-to-text app but didn't trust any of the proprietary ones with my privacy. So I decided to see if I could vibe code it with 0 macOS app & Swift experience. It uses a local binary of whisper.cpp (a fast implementation of OpenAI's Whisper voice-to-text model in C++). Github: https://github.com/richardwu/openwhisper I also decided to take this as an opportunity to compare 3 agentic coding harnesses: Cursor w/ Opus 4.6: - Best one-shot UI by far - Didn't get permissioning correct - Had issues making the "Cancel recording" hotkey being turned on all the…
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 15
Chat KJV▲73Find guidance in the word of God, with our scripture chatbot
2023 · chatkjv.com · its alternatives →
- 16

I got back into church a couple years ago and would try taking notes with Apple Notes. It was a struggle trying to type notes while focusing on the sermon. Honestly, it would have been easier to write it in a notebook but in the end I built this iOS app to solve that problem. You can record audio during a sermon (or upload files), and it transcribes using Whisper, then generates summaries, flashcards, and reflection questions tailored to Christian content. The backend is Spring Boot + Kotlin calling OpenAI's API. Instead of deploying the backend through one of the cloud providers directly I…
Dec 2025 · biblenotejournal.com · its alternatives →
- 1701
Hey HN! I've been working on a side project to create an audio transcription API based on the OpenAI whisper model. Sign up link: https://whisperapi.com I tried to make the API really easy to use and get setup with. Also, because the Whisper model is so good, turns out I can offer the service for about 75% cheaper than what seems like the industry average. I'm always looking to make improvements, so would appreciate any feedback anyone has!
2022 · whisperapi.com · its alternatives →
- 18

I was laid off recently and, instead of looking for another job right away, I decided to build something I always wanted: a transcription tool that respects user privacy. Existing transcription tools often require internet connectivity, send your private audio to cloud servers, or lock you into monthly subscriptions. I wanted something different—so I built WhisperBuddy, a privacy-first AI transcription app that runs entirely on your machine. WhisperBuddy uses OpenAI’s Whisper model (see: https://github.com/openai/whisper). While the model may not always deliver the…
2025 · whisperbuddy.com · its alternatives →
- 19
VideoToBe▲15A personal journey of building VideoToBe.com, a home-based transcription service using OpenAI Whisper, running on a single GPU machine.
2025 · videotobe.com · its alternatives →
- 20IB
I originally added this to my site to speed up my video editing process. Last year I started a youtube channel and for some of my longer videos it's annoying to rely on youtube or capcut to transcribe when Whisper is open source. Capcut also recently updated their T&Cs to say they own your content if you use their app, so I cancelled my subscription. Another use-case I have is recording my claude prompts as audio, transcribing them, and then pasting them into my terminal. I mostly work on the CLI (claude, ffmpeg, whisper), but I wanted to make a browser version. Not reinventing the wheel…
2025 · meetcosmos.com · its alternatives →
- 21IB
I use AI while reading the Bible and I suspect others do too. It's helpful whether you're struggling with the Elizabethan English, or want added context/want to know what theologians say about a passage. So I thought, why not make the AI come to you? TIA for any feedback!
2025 · scripturia.com · its alternatives →
- 22IB
Hey HN! I built Transcrib.ee to help me generate transcripts for lectures on YouTube with no captions, especially multilingual lectures. I was constantly frustrated with videos that had no transcripts or inaccurate ones, so I built a tool and decided to share it with everyone. This tool uses Groq (an AI inference engine that's different from Grok and offers very fast processing) and OpenAI's Whisper model (really accurate in multilingual) to quickly transcribe any YouTube video, regardless of the language. It's been a game-changer for my studies! To make it even faster, I created a Chrome…
2024 · transcrib.ee · its alternatives →
- 23

I was looking for a push-to-talk tool that allows me to just paste my speech transcription automatically into whatever application I'm using. I wasn't able to find anything simple enough that works, so I built my own. For now, it's just a basic CLI that works on Linux only using whisper.cpp. It is incredibly simple. You hold down the buttons, say stuff, release and then it will pipe the transcription lines to stdout. I'm using it to write this comment :)
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 24

Supercharge your transcription workflow using OpenAI Whisper
2023 · store.getwavery.com · its alternatives →
Also compare
- Whispering – Open-source, local-first dictation you can trust alternatives
- Bulk Creation of Transcripts from YouTube Playlists with Whisper alternatives
- Port of OpenAI's Whisper model in C/C++ alternatives
- Self-host Whisper As a Service with GUI and queueing alternatives
- Whispering alternatives
- I generated 70k audiobooks with OpenAI Text-to-Speech alternatives
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →