Buzz
Buzz is a desktop app that transcribes and translates audio on your own computer using OpenAI's Whisper models, with no cloud service involved.
- GitHub stars
- 22k
- Last commit
- yesterday
- Latest release
- v1.4.5
- Licence
- MIT
- Self-hosted
- Yes

Buzz is a desktop application that turns recorded speech into text and translates it, all on the user's own computer. It builds on OpenAI's Whisper speech recognition models, so audio files do not have to be uploaded to a third-party transcription service. The project is written in Python and released under the MIT license.
The app is distributed for Windows, macOS and Linux. Windows users get an installer, Linux users can choose Flatpak, Snap or AppImage packages, and a PyPI package exists for people who prefer a pip-based setup with ffmpeg installed. Nvidia GPU acceleration through CUDA is supported for faster transcription, and recent releases require Apple silicon on Macs.
Because processing happens locally, Buzz suits people who handle sensitive recordings or want to avoid per-minute fees from cloud transcription services. It runs as a local program rather than a hosted service, so there is no account to create.
Key features
- Offline audio transcription with Whisper models
- Speech translation on the local machine
- Installers for Windows, macOS and Linux
- Flatpak, Snap and AppImage packages for Linux
- Optional Nvidia CUDA GPU acceleration
- Installable from PyPI with Python 3.12
Pricing: Free and open source under the MIT license.