aTrain is a graphical application for automatically transcribing recorded speech while keeping source audio and resulting text on the user’s own computer.
The software is particularly suited to interviews and other research recordings where confidentiality, data protection and later qualitative analysis matter. Transcription uses faster-whisper, while optional speaker detection uses pyannote.audio to associate transcript segments with individual speakers. Alongside its desktop interface, aTrain provides command-line facilities for headless workflows, scripts and automated processing.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Automatic transcription of interviews, conversations and other recorded speech.
- Processes recordings locally without uploading audio or transcripts to an external service.
- Graphical interface for users who want local transcription without building their own speech-recognition pipeline.
- Uses faster-whisper for efficient inference with OpenAI Whisper-compatible models.
- Speaker detection based on pyannote.audio assigns recognised segments to individual speakers.
- Supports multilingual transcription through compatible Whisper models.
- Offers multiple model choices so users can balance recognition quality against processing requirements.
- Runs on the CPU when a suitable graphics processor is unavailable.
- Supports NVIDIA CUDA acceleration for faster transcription and speaker detection.
- Produces timestamped transcripts that preserve links between recognised text and the source recording.
- Generates output suitable for import into MAXQDA qualitative-analysis workflows.
- Output can also be used with ATLAS.ti and nVivo.
- Command-line transcription supports servers, automation and systems without a desktop session.
- CLI options cover model selection, language, speaker detection, speaker count, device and compute type.
- Model-management commands can download required models or remove models that are no longer needed.
- Available for Linux through Flathub as well as for Microsoft Windows.
- Designed for privacy-sensitive research and GDPR-related data handling requirements.
Website: github.com/aTrainTranscription/aTrain
Support:
Developer: Business Analytics and Data Science-Center, University of Graz
License: GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
aTrain is written in Python. Learn Python with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Speech Recognition Tools | |
|---|---|
| Whisper | Automatic speech recognition (system trained on 680,000 hours of data |
| Flashlight | Fast, flexible machine learning library written entirely in C++. |
| Coqui STT | Deep-learning toolkit for training and deploying speech-to-text models |
| Kaldi | C++ toolkit designed for speech recognition researchers. |
| SpeechBrain | All-in-one conversational AI toolkit based on PyTorch |
| Handy | Offline speech-to-text application |
| ESPnet | End-to-End speech processing toolkit |
| deepspeech.pytorch | Implementation of DeepSpeech2 using Baidu Warp-CTC. |
| Whispering | Transcription application with global speech-to-text functionality |
| Julius | Two-pass large vocabulary continuous speech recognition engine |
| CMUSphinx | Speech recognition system for mobile and server applications |
| Simon | Flexible speech recognition software |
| hyprwhspr | Native speech-to-text designed for Arch / Omarchy |
| ostt | Open Speech-to-Text |
| DeepSpeech | TensorFlow implementation of Baidu's DeepSpeech architecture. |
| OpenSeq2Seq | TensorFlow-based toolkit for sequence-to-sequence models |
| Eesen | End-to-End Speech Recognition |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
 Explore our comprehensive directory of recommended free and open source software. Our carefully curated collection spans every major software category.This directory is part of our ongoing series of informative articles for Linux enthusiasts. It features hundreds of detailed reviews, along with open source alternatives to proprietary solutions from major corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. You’ll also find interesting projects to try, hardware coverage, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. Discovered a useful open source Linux program that we haven’t covered yet? Let us know by completing this form. |
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