Transcrybe is Here

I’m excited to finally share that my new(ish) Mac app, Transcrybe, is now live!

If you’ve been following my work, you might remember a little menu bar app I released last year called Subtitle Me. It started as a tiny tool to subtitle live speech using Apple’s new Translation framework. I built it to help people give presentations to a bilingual audience at Swift Kansai, the developer meetup I run in Osaka.

But the more I worked on it and the more I heard from users, the more I realized it had the potential to be something more: a fast, private, on-device tool for live transcription and translation, usable with your mic or any app playing audio.

People were going through a lot of extra work to get the app to translate their YouTube videos, their Zoom meetings, and more. I realized that although subtitling me was the original use I had for the app, people had a need for subtitling in a bunch of other contexts on their Mac.

So today, Subtitle Me is reborn as Transcrybe.

In addition to now allowing you to select any audio on your Mac, it is also now based on the more robust Whisper speech-to-text engine, instead of Apple's built-in transcription engine. And as it graduates from side project to a full-blown product, I've switched it from a paid up-front app to a subscription-based app with a free trial that gives you 60 minutes of usage to see if the app fits your workflow before you have to pay anything.

To my Nihongo and Nihongo Lessons users – you’ve probably noticed that updates have been slower lately. That’s because I’ve been head-down getting Transcrybe ready for launch — wrestling with audio APIs, UI design, pricing models, and more. I’m sorry for the delay, and I truly appreciate your patience. Nihongo is still very much alive, and I’ll be shifting focus back to it soon. I haven’t forgotten the ideas and feedback you’ve shared with me, and I'll be diving back in shortly.

For now though, I hope you’ll check out Transcrybe. You can download it from the Mac App Store here:

👉 https://apps.apple.com/app/id6670778781

I'm working on a version that works outside the App Store, hoping that will be ready in the next few weeks.

Thanks for following along — and thank you, always, for supporting the things I make.

— Chris