Trawsgrifiwr
You can either connect to an external service such as YouTube to subtitle videos, click or drop into files using the online interface, or record voice directly from the microphone.
The Transcriber is continuously revised and updated, and is now available on three platforms; online , a cross-platform desktop version (Windows, Mac and Linux) and as a skill in Macsen.
One transcription, three studios
The Trawsgrifiwr Ar-lein (Online Transcriber) is free to use. Upload an audio or video file (up to 2000MB, most common formats such as MP3, WAV, M4A, MP4 and MOV) or record directly in the browser (up to about 15 minutes), in Welsh or English. Then edit and export the result in a studio built for the job:
Subtitle Studio
Caption video with frame-accurate, styleable subtitles — burn them in or export SRT.
Minutes Studio
Speaker-labelled minutes from meetings, easy to edit and ready to share.
Translation Studio
Welsh ⇆ English: bilingual minutes or subtitle translations.
No account is needed to start. A free account keeps your work in a personal library: private by default, your recordings are visible only to you, and you can share a read-only link and revoke it at any time.
Trawsgrifiwr Byw
- Real-time transcription — see the text as you speak, with an English translation under each sentence (can be turned off).
- Microphone or system audio — transcribe a video, call or online meeting playing on the computer (on screen only, for copyright reasons).
- Save the session — one click saves the audio (WAV) and the transcript as timed captions (SRT) and plain text (TXT).
- Send to the Trawsgrifiwr Ar-lein — for a fuller transcription and translation after stopping.
Your language, your theme
Choose a Welsh or English interface and a light or dark theme, or let it follow your system. And the app is built to be accessible: shortcut keys (F5–F10 to start, stop, clear, copy and save), labels and live regions for screen readers.
Windows
- Download and run the latest .msi installer from GitHub Releases (or download and extract the .zip).
macOS (Apple Silicon)
- Download the latest .pkg package from GitHub Releases.
- The app is not signed by Apple: on macOS 15 and later, click Done, then System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway.
- Requires an Apple Silicon Mac (M1 or later). Welsh-to-English translation needs macOS 26 (Tahoe) or later; on older versions the app works, but without translation.
Linux
- Download and extract the .tar.gz from GitHub Releases.
chmod +x Trawsgrifiwr-Bywthen./Trawsgrifiwr-Byw.- If the audio library is missing:
sudo apt install libopenal1(Debian/Ubuntu) orsudo dnf install openal-soft(Fedora).
Accuracy and appropriate use: the app is an aid, not a finished transcriber — everything it produces needs to be read and corrected. You get plain text without punctuation, from a fixed vocabulary of 62,392 words, for Welsh audio only; accuracy varies a great deal with audio quality. It is suitable for personal notes, drafts and as a starting point for a human transcriber — not for published content, subtitles or official records without human editing. The speech model (techiaith/kaldi-cy) is licensed CC BY-NC 3.0 — non-commercial use only.
Give it a go!
Open source resources for developers
The main basis of The Transcriber is The Trawsgrifiwr Ar-lein (Online Transcriber) is built on Whisper by OpenAI, a speech recognition engine that can be easily trained and included within any software package. Trawsgrifiwr Byw uses Bangor University’s Welsh Kaldi model (techiaith/kaldi-cy) through Vosk. You can learn more about our speech recognition work here .