Audio Text

CLI tool to transcribe YouTube videos to text, designed for IELTS listening practice.

Features

• Transcribe YouTube videos to text with timestamps
• Uses OpenAI Whisper for accurate speech-to-text
• Automatic audio chunking for long videos (up to 30 minutes)
• Interactive menu or direct CLI commands
• Export transcripts to TXT or JSON
• Local caching to avoid re-processing

Installation

Using Homebrew (macOS)

brew tap anhtt2211/tap
brew install audio-text-cli

Using pip

pip install audio-text-cli

Prerequisites

• Python 3.10+
• ffmpeg (required for audio processing)

# macOS
brew install ffmpeg

# Ubuntu/Debian
sudo apt install ffmpeg

Usage

Interactive Mode

Simply run without arguments to get an interactive menu:

audio-text

╭──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╮
│  ╔═╗┬ ┬┌┬┐┬┌─┐  ╔╦╗┌─┐─┐ ┬┌┬┐                                                │
│  ╠═╣│ │ ││││ │   ║ ├┤ ┌┴┬┘ │                                                 │
│  ╩ ╩└─┘─┴┘┴└─┘   ╩ └─┘┴ └─ ┴                                                 │
│                                                                              │
│ YouTube Video Transcription for IELTS Practice                               │
╰──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╯

  [1]    Transcribe a YouTube video
  [2]    List saved transcripts
  [3]    View a transcript
  [4]    Export transcript to file
  [5]    Delete a transcript
  [q]    Quit

Direct Commands

# Transcribe a video
audio-text transcribe https://youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID

# Transcribe with custom output directory
audio-text transcribe https://youtu.be/VIDEO_ID --output ./my-transcripts

# List saved transcripts
audio-text list

# View a transcript
audio-text view VIDEO_ID

# Export transcript (auto-generates filename from title)
audio-text export VIDEO_ID

# Export with custom filename
audio-text export VIDEO_ID ./output.txt --format txt

# Delete a transcript
audio-text delete VIDEO_ID

Output Example

╭────────────────────────────── Transcript Info ───────────────────────────────╮
│    Title: Example Video Title                                                │
│      URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID                           │
│ Duration: 5m 30s                                                             │
│ Segments: 45                                                                 │
│    Model: small                                                              │
╰──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╯

[00:00 -> 00:05] Hello and welcome to this video.
[00:05 -> 00:12] Today we're going to discuss...

Configuration

Transcripts are saved to ~/.audio-text/transcripts/ by default.

Use --output or -o to specify a custom directory.

Limitations

• Maximum video duration: 30 minutes
• English language only
• YouTube videos only (for now)

Development

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/anhtt2211/audio-text.git
cd audio-text

# Create virtual environment
python -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate

# Install in development mode
pip install -e ".[dev]"

# Run tests
pytest

# Run linting
ruff check src/

License

MIT License - see LICENSE for details.

Author

Anh Tran (@anhtt2211)