whisper-ui

January 8, 2026 ยท View on GitHub

whisper-ui is a very simple whisper-cpp GUI wrapper. It enables local/offline usage of Whisper to transcribe audio or video input files to plain text. whisper-ui uses Fyne to build the UI.

Download a whisper-ui release, available for macOS, Windows and Ubuntu. Releases bundle a whisper-cpp and ffmpeg executable to free users from any further setup/compilation tasks.

Models for whisper-cpp can be downloaded using the whisper-ui app.

Notes - macOS

Note that the releases built via github workflow are not signed. For macOS, this means you have to remove quarantine flag (using xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine whisper-ui.app).

To build whisper-ui from source:

git clone https://github.com/schnoddelbotz/whisper-ui.git
cd whisper-ui
make build-darwin

The build / Makefile fetches a static ffmpeg build, builds whisper-cpp and puts both into the .app bundle.

Notes - Linux

The Linux release contains a Makefile. It can be used to install or uninstall whisper-ui as Desktop app. For a system-wide install, use sudo make install. For an installation for the current user, use make user-install -- note that for this to work, your PATH must contain ~/.local/bin.

The Linux build expects ffmpeg to be installed via package manger / in $PATH. If not already present, use sudo apt install ffmpeg.

To build whisper-ui from source:

git clone https://github.com/schnoddelbotz/whisper-ui.git
cd whisper-ui
make build zip-linux

Notes - Windows

Like the macOS release, whisper-ui.exe is not signed - accordingly Defender will report a "unrecognized app" and clicking "More info" and then "Run anyway" will be required when starting it for the first time.

For building whisper-ui from source, see the release.yaml's windows section.

todo / issues

Status: Toy project, works for me (tested on Tahoe/ARM, Windows 11 & Ubuntu 24.04 on x86_64).

  • maybe add whisper-stream?
  • maybe embed FyneTerm to show confidence color-coding? This would also solve the next issue:
  • more verbose output/progress feedback from ffmpeg and whisper-cpp?
  • could skip ffmpeg conversion if input is already a 16kHz WAV
  • Sequioa/ARM using x86 build gives Bad CPU Type in Executable? softwareupdate --install-rosetta.
  • option to "open output upon completion" may not work on Windows, same for Markdown link to file
  • it would be nice to be able to select multiple files for conversion

license

MIT