mac-speech-analyzer 0.1.2

On-device speech transcription for macOS via Apple's SpeechAnalyzer

mac-speech-analyzer

🐍 Python package to run the macOS 26 SpeechAnalyzer API from Python to transcribe audio files.

The SpeechAnalyzer API generally provides faster and better results than other locally running transcription engines of comparable size.

Features

• On-device transcription. Audio never leaves your Mac.
• Supports many languages. Automatic model download on first use.
• Progressive output. Observe segments as they're finalized, or wait for the full transcript.

Requirements

• macOS >= 26.0
• XCode command-line tools

Installation

uv add mac-speech-analyzer
# or
pip install mac-speech-analyzer

Usage

Basic usage

from macspeechanalyzer import transcribe

text = transcribe("/path/to/file", locale="en")

Progressive transcription

transcribe returns the full transcript once analysis completes, but you can also observe segments as they're finalized. Pass any callable as on_segment and it'll be invoked once per segment, in order, with the segment text:

from macspeechanalyzer import transcribe

# default: no progressive output
text = transcribe("/path/to/file", locale="en")

# echo each segment to stdout as it's transcribed
text = transcribe("/path/to/file", locale="en", on_segment=print)

# or use your own callback
def log(segment: str) -> None:
    print(f"... {segment} ...")

text = transcribe("/path/to/file", locale="en", on_segment=log)

Segments are non-overlapping and never revised, so appending them yields the same string as the return value.

Technical details

This package is made up of two parts: the Python wrapper provides the API, but the actual functionality is achieved by embedding a Swift project which exposes functions to C. With this kind of three language interplay, a clean separation of concerns is really important. Therefore, the implementation is divided into the following four layers:

• Pure Python
• Python → C compat
• Swift → C compat
• Pure Swift

The pure Swift and pure Python layers only deal with their respective languages & types, while the compat layers do all the ugly work of converting between native and C-compatible types

Roadmap

• ✅ Basic one-shot transcription
• Class-based interface
  • Context manager implementation
• Transcription of live audio stream (microphone, ...)

Development

uv pip install -e .

to one-time-install the package as editable, from then on:

ninja

to rebuild the package

License

mac-speech-analyzer is released under the MIT License. See LICENSE for more details.