transcribing-audio

name

transcribing-audio

description

MUST be used when you need to transcribe audio files to text. Local speech-to-text (STT) transcription using Parakeet MLX on Apple Silicon - fast, private, offline. Triggers on: transcribe audio, convert audio to text, speech to text, STT, transcription, get text from audio, audio file transcription, voice to text, extract text from recording, transcribe podcast, transcribe meeting, transcribe voice memo.

Transcribing Audio

Use this skill to transcribe audio files to text using Parakeet MLX - NVIDIA's state-of-the-art ASR model running locally on Apple Silicon.

When to Use

Use this skill when the user wants to:

• Transcribe an audio file (MP3, WAV, M4A, etc.)
• Convert speech to text
• Get a text transcript from a recording
• Extract text from a podcast, meeting, or voice memo
• Generate subtitles (SRT/VTT) from audio

Prerequisites

The parakeet-mlx command is available in PATH via ~/.local/bin/parakeet-mlx.

parakeet-mlx <audio_file> [options]

Basic Usage

# Simple transcription (outputs .srt file)
parakeet-mlx /path/to/audio.mp3

# Output as plain text
parakeet-mlx /path/to/audio.mp3 --output-format txt

# Output as JSON with timestamps
parakeet-mlx /path/to/audio.mp3 --output-format json

# All formats (txt, srt, vtt, json)
parakeet-mlx /path/to/audio.mp3 --output-format all

# With word-level timestamps in subtitles
parakeet-mlx /path/to/audio.mp3 --output-format vtt --highlight-words

# Specify output directory
parakeet-mlx /path/to/audio.mp3 --output-dir /path/to/output

Output Formats

Format	Description	Use Case
txt	Plain text, no timestamps	Reading, copying, searching
srt	SubRip subtitles with timestamps	Video subtitles, editing
vtt	WebVTT subtitles with timestamps	Web video, HTML5
json	Structured data with full timestamps	Programmatic use, analysis
all	All of the above	When you need everything

Options

Option	Default	Description
--output-format	srt	Output format (txt/srt/vtt/json/all)
--output-dir	.	Directory for output files
--highlight-words	false	Word-level timestamps in SRT/VTT
--verbose / -v	false	Show detailed progress
--chunk-duration	120	Chunk duration in seconds for long audio

Model

Uses mlx-community/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3 by default - a 600M parameter model that runs efficiently on Apple Silicon with excellent accuracy.

Examples

Transcribe a voice memo

parakeet-mlx ~/Desktop/voice-memo.m4a --output-format txt

Generate subtitles for a video

parakeet-mlx video.mp4 --output-format srt --highlight-words

Transcribe multiple files

parakeet-mlx file1.mp3 file2.mp3 file3.mp3 --output-format txt

Reading the Output

After transcription, read the output file to show the user:

cat /path/to/audio.txt  # For text output

For JSON output, you can parse the timestamps:

cat /path/to/audio.json | jq '.sentences[] | {text, start, end}'

Notes

• First run may download the model (~600MB) which is cached for future use
• Runs entirely locally - no API calls, fully private
• Supports WAV, MP3, M4A, FLAC, and other common audio formats
• For very long audio (>2 hours), chunking is automatic