typeheard

Drop a recording, get what was said.

typeheard transcribes the audio and video people already have (interviews, lectures, podcasts, voice memos) with whisper.cpp on our own hardware, and bills by the minute of audio instead of by the month.

• Free: the first 3 minutes of any file, no account.
• Whole files: one credit per audio minute. $5 buys 300 minutes, and minutes never expire.
• Agents: x402 per call, no account and no key.
• Formats: plain text, timestamped Markdown, SRT, VTT, JSON.
• Surfaces: web, HTTP API, CLI, TUI and an MCP server.

Built because people keep asking Reddit for "an Otter.ai alternative for files I already have" and "transcription software for my thesis interviews".

Use it

curl -fsSL https://typeheard.com/install.sh | sh              # installs the typeheard CLI

typeheard interview.m4a                  # prints the text
typeheard talk.mp4 --format srt --out talk.srt
typeheard login                          # API key for whole files
typeheard tui

No install: npx -y @profullstack/typeheard interview.m4a (Node 22.6+).

curl -F file=@interview.m4a -H "Authorization: Bearer $TYPEHEARD_API_KEY" https://typeheard.com/api/v1/transcripts
curl https://typeheard.com/api/v1/transcripts/<id>/txt        # also md, srt, vtt, json

MCP: npx -y @profullstack/typeheard-mcp with TYPEHEARD_API_KEY set. Its tools are transcribe_file, get_transcript and list_transcripts.

How it is built

apps/web	Bun + Hono: pages, API, magic-link + passkey auth, CoinPay top-ups, x402
packages/transcribe	ffmpeg + whisper.cpp via @profullstack/media2markdown-core; the formats
packages/db	Postgres. transcripts is also the job queue (for update skip locked)
packages/cli	@profullstack/typeheard: CLI, hqtui TUI, and the API client
packages/mcp	@profullstack/typeheard-mcp: stdio MCP server
packages/auth, payments, notify, config	shared with bg0ne.com

A job is a row. The upload is written to DATA_DIR, the row is queued, and a worker claims it, transcribes it and stores the segments. The upload is deleted as soon as the words are out. Jobs survive a restart. A failure refunds the minutes it was charged.

Run it yourself

docker compose up        # Postgres + the app on :3000, payments off, everything free

Or bun install && DATABASE_URL=... bun run dev, with ffmpeg and whisper-cli plus a ggml model where media2markdown-core looks ($XDG_DATA_HOME/media2markdown/).

Variable
DATABASE_URL	required
SITE_URL	public origin; the passkey rpID comes from it
WHISPER_MODEL	path to a ggml model; the image bakes ggml-base.bin (multilingual)
CONCURRENCY	transcriptions at once (default 1)
PREVIEW_SECONDS	free preview length (default 180)
RESEND_API_KEY, MAIL_FROM	sign-in mail
COINPAY_API_KEY, COINPAY_BUSINESS_ID, COINPAY_WEBHOOK_SECRET	top-ups
X402_ENABLED, X402_PAY_TO, COINPAY_X402_KEY	per-call payment for agents

Secrets live in the logicsrc vault (typeheardcom--prod), not in a .env.

Test

DATABASE_URL=postgres://... bun test

MIT.