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Hear

Hear is an Objective-C command-line interface for macOS’s built-in speech recognition, handling live microphone input and audio-file transcription.

Explore the practical guide ↓

Independent OpenViST project profile, based on linked sources.

Hear — OpenViST project profile in Audio & Voice AI.
OpenViST project illustration. See the linked sources for product details.
Understand the project

Practical overview

When it fits

Use Hear when you want microphone or audio-file transcription through macOS speech recognition from a command line, especially when the on-device option fits your locale and workflow.

Who it is for

  • macOS users who want to transcribe microphone input from a terminal.
  • People who need to turn audio files into text using macOS speech recognition.
  • Developers who want a command-line transcription tool within a macOS workflow.

Documented uses

  • Capture spoken audio from the default microphone as text.
  • Transcribe a supported audio file and redirect the text output to a file.
  • Request on-device speech recognition with the -d option.
Before you choose

Requirements & limits

The repository documents a downloadable build for macOS 13 or later on ARM and Intel 64-bit Macs. Hear is free and open source under the BSD 3-Clause license.

  • The tool depends on macOS’s built-in speech recognition rather than a separately described recognition engine.
  • On-device recognition is selected with -d and is limited to locales supported by Siri.
  • Without -d, audio data may be sent to Apple servers; the README describes an approximately 500-character limit for that route.
  • A full Xcode installation is required to build via Homebrew; source builds require Xcode command-line build tools.

Check current requirements in the official documentation. Source-based guidance does not mean OpenViST has run or independently tested this project.

Source-based practical guide

Transcribe an audio file to a text file

Use Hear’s documented command to write a recording’s transcription to a text file.

Before you start

  • Hear installed on macOS
  • An audio file in a format supported by CoreAudio

Steps

  1. Open a terminal.

  2. Run hear -d -i /path/to/recording.wav > transcribed_text.txt, replacing the example path with the audio file’s path.

Expected outcome

The transcription output is redirected to transcribed_text.txt, and the -d flag requests on-device speech recognition.

Guide limitations

  • With -d, only locales supported by Siri work.
  • Without -d, data may be sent to Apple servers; the README reports a limit of about 500 characters for that route.
Documentation 1 ↗
Evidence and transparency

Sources & review

Official repository ↗
Source record details
Source availability
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Sources checked
14 October 2026
Original website title
sveinbjornt/hear · Official homepage title · retained in its source language
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