this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2026
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Are there currently usable FOSS tools for speech to text conversion (transcription) available under GNU/Linux? Purpose is transcribing stuff like downloaded podcasts. I don't need or want any kind of GUI tool. Just a CLI program that takes an audio file and converts it to text. I know there are various proprietary systems that do this, such as youtube transcription. One of my questions is whether the free stuff that's out there is anywhere near as good. I'm not too concerned about the input format (I can convert with ffmpeg), or about CPU time within reason (I don't mind letting my server spend all night crunching a 1 hour audio). I'd prefer to not require a GPU but if that helps a lot, I can get hold one of one as needed.

Question is about speech to text (STT). I'm not asking about the opposite, text-to-speech (TTS). For some reason people often confuse the two of these.

Thanks!

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[–] TehPers@beehaw.org 0 points 2 days ago

If you have an integrated GPU in your processor (I'm assuming you do unless you have no graphical output at all), you can also try to run one of their really small models on it. Otherwise, their smaller models are also faster, so I'd recommend trying those on your CPU to start with.