A local speech-to-text tool for Apple Silicon Macs. It turns WAV or other audio files into timestamped plain-text transcripts.

Use it to create transcripts from recordings, interviews, meetings, or other audio files. The output is divided into 15-second time ranges.

It lets you transcribe audio on your own Mac instead of sending recordings to an online service. It also handles format conversion when ffmpeg is installed.

transcribe — Skill for Claude Code and Codex by badlogic/pi-skills

About the project

badlogic/pi-skills is a collection of reusable skills that extend pi-coding-agent and work with several other coding agents. Developers use it to give agents capabilities such as web search, browser automation, Google service access, transcription, VS Code integration, and YouTube transcript retrieval.

badlogic/pi-skills · 2,655 stars · on GitHub

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent

npx skills add badlogic/pi-skills --skill transcribe

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/badlogic/pi-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/badlogic/pi-skills/transcribe/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/badlogic/pi-skills/transcribe)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/badlogic/pi-skills/transcribe"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/badlogic/pi-skills/transcribe/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/badlogic/pi-skills/transcribe"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/badlogic/pi-skills/transcribe.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 25 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 275 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan A 1 finding. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits

Socket warn 15 Sept 2026
Snyk warn 15 Sept 2026
NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026

How audits are shown

Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.

Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00025	$0.00275
Opus 5.5	$0.00010	$0.00110
Sonnet 5.5	$0.00005	$0.00055
Haiku 4.5	$0.00003	$0.00028

Measured 2mo ago against content hash 45a996d4621a, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

transcribe scanned grade A with 1 finding against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2mo ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (transcribe.sh), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Makes network callslowCapability

Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.

- `curl` and `tar`

transcribe/SKILL.md · 44 lines

What it actually says

Transcribe

Local speech-to-text using parakeet-cpp-transcribe on Apple Silicon macOS.

Usage

{baseDir}/transcribe.sh <audio-file>

The first run downloads the macOS arm64 binary from the latest badlogic/pibot GitHub release into the extension's ignored bin directory:

{extensionDir}/bin/parakeet-cpp-transcribe

({extensionDir} is the parent directory of this skill's {baseDir}.) The binary downloads its GGUF model automatically if missing.

Output

Plain text timestamped in 15 second chunks is written to stdout:

[00:00-00:15] transcript text
[00:15-00:30] more transcript text

Model/GGML diagnostic logs are written to stderr. Redirect stderr to hide them:

{baseDir}/transcribe.sh <audio-file> 2>/dev/null

Requirements

Apple Silicon macOS only
curl and tar
ffmpeg for non-WAV input: brew install ffmpeg

Files

What ships with it

2 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

2mo ago First seen · 44 lines · 25 tokens per session scan A 45a996d4621a

Subscribe to this mod's changes

transcribe is a skill published in the GitHub repository badlogic/pi-skills (2,655 stars, last pushed 5mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 25 tokens to every session and 275 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5.5. A static security scan graded it A with 1 finding (makes network calls). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

Creative and media

transcribe next to 6 skills from other repositories
Mod	Type	Stars	Last push	Licence	Scan	Tokens	Works with
transcribebadlogic/pi-skills	Skill	2.7k	5mo ago	MIT	A	25	Claude Code, Codex
imagegenopenai/codex	Skill	133k	yesterday	Apache-2.0	A	113	Codex
playwright-climicrosoft/playwright	Skill	99k	yesterday	Apache-2.0	A	19	Claude Code
local-ai-agentsmicrosoft/ai-agents-for-beginners	Skill	79k	4d ago	MIT	A	200	Claude Code, Codex
systematic-debuggingobra/superpowers	Skill	313k	3d ago	MIT	A	21	Claude Code
next-cache-components-adoptionvercel/next.js	Skill	143k	today	MIT	A	95	Claude Code
next-partial-prefetching-adoptionvercel/next.js	Skill	143k	today	MIT	A	103	Claude Code

transcribe