Alternatives
Products that do what OpenTheo – Transcribed and searchable Bible teaching with Whisper.cpp does
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…
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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
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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
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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
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Schibsted created a transcription service for our journalists to transcribe audio interviews and podcasts really quick.
2023 · github.com
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2022 · freesubtitles.ai
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Hey 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
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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
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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
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Hi HN! I'm stoked to share a project I've been working on called PDF to Podcast. It's a free, open-source tool that automatically converts PDF documents into engaging, informative podcast-style audio content using large language models and text-to-speech tech. Inspiration: The idea for this project came from the NotebookLM demo at Google I/O, where they showcased generating audio dialogue from uploaded PDFs and other sources. However, that audio feature hasn't been publicly released yet, and I wanted to challenge myself to build something similar using existing tools and APIs. How it…
2024 · pdf-to-podcast.com
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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
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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
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OpenBrief is basically a GUI for yt-dlp with some AI on top — paste a link, it downloads locally, and transcription and voice generation run with local AI on your machine. Summaries and chat over the transcript use an LLM, which is bring-your-own-key for now. It's open source and free.
May 2026 · github.com
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2021 · github.com
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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
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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
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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
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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 :)
Sep 2025 · github.com
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I rebuilt Biblos, my semantic Bible search app, to run entirely in your browser. No more server costs. The main challenge was fitting an accurate text embedding model into browsers. Last year's version cost $20 monthly to host. The new version runs free on Vercel and searches 31k Bible verses without sending data to any server. I pre-compute embeddings for all 31,000 Bible verses offline using BGE-large-en-v1.5. Each verse becomes a 1024-dimensional vector stored as JSON, compressed into ZIP files by book. When you visit the site, your browser downloads Transformers.js and the BGE model. The…
Oct 2025 · biblos.app
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I created a daily game where you get a random Bible verse and try to identify the book (e.g. "Psalms", "Genesis", "Luke") in as few guesses as possible. I have absolutely no clue how I got the idea, other than the fact that I grew up in the Orthodox Church and all my other coding projects have been faith-related (a terrible mobile app (1) and slightly broken Byzantine chant website (2) ). I'm a relatively new developer and I've been hungry for a project to build that people will actually use and share around, so I hoped this would fit the bill. Sure enough, friends and family have been…
Jan 2026 · bibdle.com
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I’m Leif and I wanted to share the new product I’ve been working on recently, TurboScribe (https://turboscribe.ai). It’s pretty simple: unlimited Whisper transcription (starting at $10 per month). It supports large-v2, small, and base models. And yeah, it really is unlimited. The most active users have transcribed 1k+ hours using Whisper large-v2 (in other words, you can transcribe all 30 x 24 x 60 = 43200 minutes of your life every month if you want!). When I started building this a few months ago, I got connected with some initial users with higher volume transcription needs…
2023 · turboscribe.ai
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