Buzz: Popular open-source desktop app that transcribes and translates audio offline on your own computer using OpenAI's Whisper. Scriberr: Open-source, self-hosted AI audio transcription app that runs Whisper models locally with speaker diarization, summaries, and chat-with-transcript. Which one wins depends on your platform mix, budget, and how hands-off you want notes to be.
How Hosiqo compares and tests toolsFinal recommendation
Shortlist Buzz when transcribing recorded meetings, interviews, podcasts, or lectures offline matters most, and Scriberr when researchers and journalists generating diarized transcripts of recorded conversations matters most. Run both through a week of actual calls to see which suits your workflow.
Popular open-source desktop app that transcribes and translates audio offline on your own computer using OpenAI's Whisper.
Open-source, self-hosted AI audio transcription app that runs Whisper models locally with speaker diarization, summaries, and chat-with-transcript.
Buzz is a widely used open-source desktop application that transcribes and translates audio offline on the user's personal computer, powered by OpenAI's Whisper. It is MIT-licensed and actively maintained, with v1.4.4 released in March 2026, and it has grown a large community with roughly 19.7k GitHub stars. Buzz runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux, with installation options including Flatpak, Snap, and PyPI. It supports both importing existing audio and video files and real-time transcription from microphone input, and it can export results in formats such as TXT, SRT, and VTT for subtitling and documentation. The app includes an advanced transcript viewer with search and playback controls, a watch folder for automatically transcribing new files, and a command-line interface for automation. It offers GPU acceleration through CUDA for Nvidia cards, Apple Silicon support, and Vulkan for many other GPUs, which makes faster transcription practical even on laptops. Buzz also provides speaker identification and speech separation for noisy audio, plus a plugin system that adds capabilities like AI-generated summaries. Because all processing happens locally, recordings and transcripts remain on the user's machine rather than being uploaded to a cloud service. Pricing varies by plan. Check the official website for current pricing.
Best suited for
Scriberr is an open-source, self-hosted audio transcription application aimed at people who want to keep recordings and transcripts on their own hardware. It uses the open-source Whisper family of models (via the WhisperX engine) to transcribe audio and video files entirely offline, with no requirement to send data to a cloud provider. The project is distributed under the MIT license and is packaged as a single binary, with a Go backend and a Svelte frontend compiled into the binary, while Python handles the underlying AI transcription. Beyond raw transcription, Scriberr can automatically detect and label different speakers (diarization), generate summaries using custom prompts, and let users chat with a transcript by connecting to Ollama or OpenAI-compatible providers. It includes a transcript reader with playback follow-along and seek-from-text, a built-in audio recorder, note-taking, and a folder watcher plus API endpoints for automation and integration with tools like n8n. The maintainer publicly noted development is paused but not abandoned, and community contributions are welcome; the most recent release at the time of review was v1.2.0 in December 2025. Pricing varies by plan. Check the official website for current pricing.
Best suited for
Buzz is a free tier with paid upgrades (freemium); Scriberr is a free tier with paid upgrades (freemium). Always confirm current pricing on each vendor's site before buying.
| Feature | Buzz | Scriberr |
|---|---|---|
| Core capability | Offline transcription and translation using OpenAI's Whisper | Local, offline transcription using Whisper models via the WhisperX engine |
| Standout feature | Real-time transcription from microphone input | Automatic speaker diarization (who said what) |
| Team usage | Speaker identification and speech separation for noisy audio | AI summaries with custom prompts via Ollama or OpenAI-compatible providers |
| Integrations | Exports to TXT, SRT, and VTT | Chat with your transcripts to ask questions and pull insights |
| Languages & capture | Watch folder for automatic transcription and a command-line interface | Built-in audio recorder and note-taking on transcripts |
| Best-fit workflow | GPU acceleration via CUDA, Apple Silicon, and Vulkan | Folder watcher and API endpoints for automation workflows |
Buzz
Choose Buzz if you need transcribing recorded meetings, interviews, podcasts, or lectures offline — strengths include fully offline so audio and transcripts stay on the user's computer.
Scriberr
Choose Scriberr if you need privacy-conscious teams transcribing meeting and interview recordings on their own infrastructure — strengths include fully self-hosted and offline, keeping audio and transcripts on your own hardware.
Buzz
Scriberr
It depends on your workflow. Buzz is strong for transcribing recorded meetings, interviews, podcasts, or lectures offline, while Scriberr is strong for privacy-conscious teams transcribing meeting and interview recordings on their own infrastructure. Both transcribe and summarize meetings.
Buzz is a free tier with paid upgrades and Scriberr is a free tier with paid upgrades. Check each vendor's pricing page for the latest plans and free-tier limits.
Often yes: teams combine tools when one handles capture and another handles analysis.
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