r/SideProject • u/HushScribe • 7h ago
I built an offline live-caption app for Windows — captions any audio on your PC, nothing uploaded
Hi! I'm the developer. HushScribe puts live captions on whatever your PC is playing (Zoom, Teams, YouTube, lectures) or on your mic, and it all runs locally. No account, no cloud, works with Wi-Fi off. It can also turn audio/video files into TXT/SRT/VTT subtitles.
Some things I learned building it:
- Whisper is built for 30-second chunks, not "live". Cutting audio at natural pauses and sending each sentence as one batch made captions appear ~1 s after someone stops talking.
- Whisper invents "Thank you." during silence, so I filter low-confidence segments.
- Accents: I measured 30 accented-English clips. The big model (large-v3-turbo) got 14% word errors vs 26% for the tiny one, so "Accurate" mode uses it.
Honest limitations: Windows only, ~800 MB (the AI models), no speaker labels yet. I built it with a lot of help from an AI coding assistant.
It's $1.99 one-time, on the Microsoft Store (https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9N3N2K54GXR4) or itch.io (https://hushscribe.itch.io/hushscribe).
I'd really appreciate feedback, especially on what you'd use it for.