Flatsonar

Live Captions

by abb128

Live Captioning for the desktop

Broad permissions Verified creator GPL-3.0-or-later v0.4.2
Install Source code
Screenshot 1 of Live Captions Screenshot 2 of Live Captions

About

Live Captions is an application that provides realtime automatic subtitles for the Linux desktop.

Only the English language is supported currently. Other languages may produce gibberish or a bad phonetic translation.

Features:

  • Simple interface
  • Caption desktop/mic audio locally, powered by deep learning
  • No API keys, no proprietary services/libraries, no telemetry, no spying, no data collection, does not use network permission
  • Adjust font, font size, and toggle uppercase/lowercase
  • Less confident text is faded (darkened), this feature can be disabled

Running this requires a somewhat-decent CPU that can perform realtime captioning, especially if you want to be doing other tasks (such as video decode) while running Live Captions. It has been tested working on:

  • Intel i7-2670QM (2011)
  • Intel i5-8265U (2018)
  • AMD Ryzen 5 1600 (2017)
  • Steam Deck

GPU is not required or used.

The live captions may not be accurate. It may make mistakes, including when it comes to numbers. Please do not rely on the results for anything critical or important.

More models may be trained and released in the future with better and more robust accuracy.

Permissions

1 permission weaken the sandbox. Flatsonar asks before installing.

  • X11 display: X11 lets apps read input and windows of other apps
    --socket=x11
  • inter-process communication (needed for X11)
    --share=ipc
  • Wayland display
    --socket=wayland
  • audio
    --socket=pulseaudio
  • X11 display, only when Wayland is unavailable
    --socket=fallback-x11
  • GPU acceleration
    --device=dri

Who publishes this

The creator demonstrably controls this app id: Flathub verification, the hosting account owns the namespace, or a well-known file on their domain.

  • installs a prebuilt binary instead of building from source (x2)
    source:prebuilt
  • verified on Flathub: the developer proved they control this app id
    publisher:flathub

Maintenance

Recent activity on the upstream repository, or built and reviewed by Flathub.

No staleness signals: recent activity, or built and reviewed by Flathub.