live-transcribe-ios

What It Does

Opens the iPhone microphone and live-transcribes whatever it hears using Apple’s on-device SFSpeechRecognizer. No network round-trips, no API keys, no model downloads, no per-minute cost. The native iOS counterpart to the browser-based ~/apps/live-transcribe/ repo.

When To Use

• When you want a free, offline transcript of a meeting, conversation, or your own thinking-out-loud.
• When you do not want to send audio to a cloud transcription service for privacy reasons.
• When you need a quick paragraph-broken transcript you can copy and paste into notes.

How It Works

1. Launch the app, grant microphone and speech recognition permissions.
2. Tap Start. The screen-stay-awake idle timer turns off so the phone does not sleep mid-session.
3. Speak. Words appear with paragraph breaks on any pause longer than 2.2 seconds (same threshold as the web version).
4. Tap Copy to push the full transcript to the clipboard. Tap Clear to start fresh. Tap Stop to end the session.

Where It Lives

• Repo: ~/apps/live-transcribe-ios/
• Bundle ID: com.ojhurst.livetranscribe
• Project file generated by xcodegen from project.yml — never edit LiveTranscribe.xcodeproj directly.

Build

Requires Xcode and xcodegen (brew install xcodegen).

cd ~/apps/live-transcribe-ios
xcodegen
open LiveTranscribe.xcodeproj

In Xcode: pick a signing team in Signing & Capabilities, plug in an iPhone, hit Run. Simulator microphone is hit-or-miss, so test on real hardware.

Known Gaps / Quirks

• iOS 17+ only (uses AVAudioApplication.requestRecordPermission).
• English (en-US) only. Change the Locale in SpeechManager for other languages.
• No speaker diarization, no punctuation beyond what SFSpeechRecognizer provides.
• Recognition is on-device when supported, but falls back to network if the device says it is not capable.
• Auto-restarts the recognition task when iOS hits its per-task duration limit, so long sessions do not drop silently.