For a transcribing voice-notes app, the first results are chidiwilliams/buzz (This open-source desktop application, built around the Whisper model, lets you record voice memos and automatically transcribe them locally with speaker diarization and plugin extensibility — exactly the full-featured, privacy-focused voice-to-text app you're looking for), syedhali/ezaudio and scottschiller/soundmanager2 (SoundManager2 is a cross-browser audio playback library for consistent audio rendering, not a voice recording or note-taking application, so it does not meet the core need for a voice memo app with transcription). naudio/naudio and zadam/trilium round out the shortlist. Compare the match explanations and check the project documentation against your requirements.
Open-source mobile and desktop applications that record audio and automatically convert speech into searchable text.
Buzz is a desktop application that provides a local speech-to-text engine for transcribing and translating audio and video files. By leveraging local machine inference, the software ensures data privacy and offline performance, removing the need for cloud connectivity during media processing. The application distinguishes itself through a modular plugin architecture that allows for the integration of custom functionality, such as content summarization and automated text formatting, without modifying the core codebase. It also features a speaker diarization pipeline that identifies and labels
This open-source desktop application, built around the Whisper model, lets you record voice memos and automatically transcribe them locally with speaker diarization and plugin extensibility — exactly the full-featured, privacy-focused voice-to-text app you're looking for.
EZAudio is an audio library for Apple platforms that provides standardized interfaces for microphone capture, file playback, and hardware output. It functions as a low-latency audio processor and visualization framework designed to manipulate audio buffers and route signals with minimal delay. The project features a hardware-accelerated waveform renderer for drawing real-time audio amplitudes and rolling plots. It also includes a Fast Fourier Transform analyzer that converts time-domain audio samples into frequency-domain data for spectral analysis. The library covers a broad range of capabi
EZAudio is a low-level audio processing library for Apple platforms that handles microphone capture and playback, but it does not provide automatic transcription, note organization, or a complete voice memo application—it is a building block for audio recording, not the self-contained app with speech-to-text this search asks for.
SoundManager2 is a JavaScript audio API and cross-browser audio engine designed to provide consistent playback across different web browsers and devices. It functions as an HTML5 audio wrapper and playback manager that abstracts native APIs into a unified interface, ensuring compatibility through an automatic switching mechanism between available audio backends and codecs. The library distinguishes itself with an RTMP audio streamer for network communication with media servers and a built-in ID3 metadata parser for extracting track titles, artist information, and genre tags from audio files.
SoundManager2 is a cross-browser audio playback library for consistent audio rendering, not a voice recording or note-taking application, so it does not meet the core need for a voice memo app with transcription.
NAudio is a .NET audio library that provides playback, recording, format conversion, and signal processing capabilities for Windows applications. It serves as an audio format converter between common formats like WAV, MP3, AAC, and AIFF using ACM or Media Foundation codecs, and functions as an audio playback and recording API through Windows audio APIs including WaveOut, DirectSound, ASIO, and WASAPI. The library includes an audio stream processor that can mix, trim, loop, fade, resample, and adjust pitch or channel count of audio streams with a floating-point engine. It also provides an audi
NAudio is a lower-level .NET audio library for recording and playback, not a complete voice note app—it lacks automatic transcription, note organization, and search, so it would only serve as a building block for such an application.
Trilium is a hierarchical personal knowledge base and digital garden tool designed to organize information into a tree of linked nodes. It functions as a JavaScript programmable wiki and a self-hosted note server, allowing users to maintain a private database of documents synchronized across multiple devices. The platform distinguishes itself through an embedded scripting engine for automating tasks and a REST API that exposes internal data and actions to external tools. Users can further extend the system by modifying the user interface layout and styling through a custom theme engine. The
Trilium is a hierarchical note-taking and knowledge base tool, not a voice memo recording app with built-in speech-to-text transcription; while it can organize notes, it lacks the dedicated audio recording and automatic transcription features this search requires.
whisper.cpp is a C++ implementation of the Whisper speech-to-text model, serving as a lightweight machine learning inference engine and quantized runtime. It provides high-performance automatic speech recognition and real-time audio transcription without requiring a Python environment. The project utilizes model quantization to reduce memory usage and increase inference speed on local hardware. It incorporates hardware acceleration to optimize processing speed across different processors. The system covers audio processing capabilities including voice activity detection, speaker diarization,
whisper.cpp is a high-performance local speech-to-text engine, not a complete voice memo app — it provides the transcription piece but lacks voice recording, playback, and note organization features.
Duix-Mobile is a software development kit for deploying real-time conversational AI characters on mobile devices. It enables the creation of interactive digital humans capable of fluid voice-to-voice interactions, featuring low-latency speech recognition and synchronized lip movements. The project distinguishes itself through the ability to integrate custom external language models and speech providers to define an avatar's intelligence and voice. It supports the generation of real-time multilingual subtitles and provides mechanisms to track the training status of newly created digital charac
Duix-Mobile is a software development kit for building interactive AI avatars with speech recognition, not a dedicated voice memo recording app—so it’s a neighboring building block rather than the standalone note-taking application you’re looking for.
This project is a speech recognition and translation engine that utilizes a sequence-to-sequence transformer architecture to convert audio into text. It is built upon a weakly supervised learning framework, which leverages large-scale, unlabelled audio-transcript data to create generalized speech representations capable of performing simultaneous transcription, language identification, and translation. The system distinguishes itself through a unified multi-task modeling approach that shares token sequences across different objectives, allowing it to handle diverse languages and vocabularies
Whisper is a speech-to-text model, not a complete voice note app—it handles transcription but lacks built-in voice recording, playback, note organization, and search, so it is a component you would integrate into a real recording application rather than the app itself.
RealtimeSTT is a local speech-to-text engine and real-time automatic speech recognition server. It utilizes transformer-based recognition and omnilingual pipelines to convert live audio streams into text, providing a WebSocket-based streaming API for raw PCM audio transmission. The project is distinguished by a dual-backend transcription pipeline that uses a lightweight engine for immediate partial suggestions and a heavier model for final high-accuracy results. It includes a wake word detection system to trigger recording and employs a shared-resource inference model to distribute heavy spee
RealtimeSTT is a local speech-to-text engine and ASR server, not a completed voice memo application — it provides the transcription building block but lacks the note organization, playback, and search features needed for a self-contained voice note app.
Audacity is a cross-platform digital audio workstation and multi-track audio editor. It serves as a comprehensive suite for capturing live audio input, refining sound files through splicing and effects, and mixing multi-track audio files using a non-destructive waveform interface. The project functions as a VST3 plugin host, providing a software environment to load and execute audio effects and virtual instruments for real-time signal processing. It also includes an audio spectrum analyzer for visualizing frequencies and waveforms to identify specific sonic characteristics. The software cove
Audacity is a powerful audio editor and recorder, but it lacks built-in automatic speech-to-text transcription and note organization features, so it is not the voice note app with transcription you are looking for.
wavesurfer.js is a WebAudio playback library and interactive waveform visualizer that renders audio data onto an HTML5 canvas. It enables users to see and navigate sound files through a visual representation of audio peaks, allowing for direct seeking and playback control within a web browser. The project is distinguished by its flexible rendering model, which can use precomputed peak data to display waveforms without downloading or decoding the full audio file. It utilizes a plugin-based extension model to integrate advanced tools such as spectrograms, interactive audio timelines, and real-t
Wavesurfer.js is an audio waveform visualization and playback library, not a full voice memo app—it lacks built-in recording, transcription, and note organization features.
Howler.js is a JavaScript library that provides a unified interface for managing audio playback across web browsers. It functions as a cross-browser audio engine, abstracting complex browser audio APIs into a consistent developer experience while ensuring reliable performance through automatic fallback mechanisms. The library distinguishes itself by offering specialized tools for spatial audio and efficient asset management. It includes a spatial audio framework that maps three-dimensional vectors to audio nodes for immersive sound positioning, alongside an audio sprite manager that allows de
howler.js is a JavaScript library for cross-browser audio playback, but it lacks voice recording, automatic transcription, note organization, and local processing — it would only serve as a playback component within a full voice note app, not as the application itself.
| Repository | Stars | Language | License | Last push |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| chidiwilliams/buzz | 17.9K | Python | mit | |
| syedhali/ezaudio | 5K | Objective-C | NOASSERTION | |
| 5.1K |
| JavaScript |
| NOASSERTION |
| naudio/naudio | 6.1K | C# | mit |
| zadam/trilium | 36.6K | TypeScript | AGPL-3.0 |
| ggerganov/whisper.cpp | 50.8K | C++ | MIT |
| duixcom/duix-mobile | 8.1K | C++ | NOASSERTION |
| openai/whisper | 102.8K | Python | MIT |
| koljab/realtimestt | 9.5K | Python | mit |
| audacity/audacity | 17.2K | C++ | NOASSERTION |