LocalVocal - Speech AI assistant OBS Plugin

Introduction

LocalVocal lets you transcribe, locally on your machine, speech into text and simultaneously translate to any language. ✅ No GPU required, ✅ no cloud costs, ✅ no network and ✅ no downtime! Privacy first - all data stays on your machine.

If this free plugin has been valuable consider adding a ⭐ to this GH repo, rating it on OBS, subscribing to my YouTube channel where I post updates, and supporting my work on GitHub, Patreon or OpenCollective 🙏

Internally the plugin is running OpenAI's Whisper to process real-time the speech and predict a transcription. It's using the Whisper.cpp project from ggerganov to run the Whisper network efficiently on CPUs and GPUs. Translation is done with CTranslate2.

Usage

https://youtu.be/vHQ5HGvbRGQ https://youtu.be/4llyfNi9FGs

Do more with LocalVocal:

Current Features:

Transcribe audio to text in real time in 100 languages
Display captions on screen using text sources
Send captions to a .txt or .srt file (to read by external sources or video playback) with and without aggregation option
Sync'ed captions with OBS recording timestamps
Send captions on a RTMP stream to e.g. YouTube, Twitch
Bring your own Whisper model (any GGML)
Translate captions in real time to major languages (both Whisper built-in translation as well as NMT models)
CUDA, OpenCL, Apple Arm64, AVX & SSE acceleration support
Filter out or replace any part of the produced captions
Partial transcriptions for a streaming-captions experience

Roadmap:

More robust built-in translation options
Additional output options: .vtt, .ssa, .sub, etc.
Speaker diarization (detecting speakers in a multi-person audio stream)

Check out our other plugins:

Background Removal removes background from webcam without a green screen.
Detect will detect and track >80 types of objects in real-time inside OBS
CleanStream for real-time filler word (uh,um) and profanity removal from a live audio stream
URL/API Source that allows fetching live data from an API and displaying it in OBS.
Squawk adds lifelike local text-to-speech capabilities built-in OBS

Download

Check out the latest releases for downloads and install instructions.

Models

The plugin ships with the Tiny.en model, and will autonomously download other Whisper models through a dropdown. There's also an option to select an external GGML Whisper model file if you have it on disk.

Get more models from https://ggml.ggerganov.com/ and HuggingFace, follow the instructions on whisper.cpp to create your own models or download others such as distilled models.

Building

The plugin was built and tested on Mac OSX (Intel & Apple silicon), Windows (with and without Nvidia CUDA) and Linux.

Start by cloning this repo to a directory of your choice.

Mac OSX

Using the CI pipeline scripts, locally you would just call the zsh script, which builds for the architecture specified in $MACOS_ARCH (either x86_64 or arm64).

$ MACOS_ARCH="x86_64" ./.github/scripts/build-macos -c Release

Install

The above script should succeed and the plugin files (e.g. obs-localvocal.plugin) will reside in the ./release/Release folder off of the root. Copy the .plugin file to the OBS directory e.g. ~/Library/Application Support/obs-studio/plugins.

To get .pkg installer file, run for example

$ ./.github/scripts/package-macos -c Release

(Note that maybe the outputs will be in the Release folder and not the install folder like pakage-macos expects, so you will need to rename the folder from build_x86_64/Release to build_x86_64/install)

Linux

Ubuntu

For successfully building on Ubuntu, first clone the repo, then from the repo directory:

$ sudo apt install -y libssl-dev
$ ./.github/scripts/build-linux

Copy the results to the standard OBS folders on Ubuntu

$ sudo cp -R release/RelWithDebInfo/lib/* /usr/lib/
$ sudo cp -R release/RelWithDebInfo/share/* /usr/share/

Note: The official OBS plugins guide recommends adding plugins to the ~/.config/obs-studio/plugins folder. This has to do with the way you installed OBS.

In case the above doesn't work, attempt to copy the files to the ~/.config folder:

$ mkdir -p ~/.config/obs-studio/plugins/obs-localvocal/bin/64bit
$ cp -R release/RelWithDebInfo/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/obs-plugins/* ~/.config/obs-studio/plugins/obs-localvocal/bin/64bit/
$ mkdir -p ~/.config/obs-studio/plugins/obs-localvocal/data
$ cp -R release/RelWithDebInfo/share/obs/obs-plugins/obs-localvocal/* ~/.config/obs-studio/plugins/obs-localvocal/data/

Other distros

For other distros where you can't use the CI build script, you can build the plugin as follows

Clone the repository and install these dependencies using your distribution's package manager:
- libssl (with development headers)

Generate the CMake build scripts (adjust folders if necessary)

cmake -B build-dir --preset linux-x86_64 -DUSE_SYSTEM_CURL=ON -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=./output_dir

Build the plugin and copy the files to the output directory
```
cmake --build build-dir --target install
```

Copy plugin to OBS plugins folder

mkdir -p ~/.config/obs-studio/plugins/bin/64bit
cp -R ./output_dir/lib/obs-plugins/* ~/.config/obs-studio/plugins/bin/64bit/

N.B. Depending on your system, the plugin might be in ./output_dir/lib64/obs-plugins instead.

Copy plugin data to OBS plugins folder - Possibly only needed on first install

mkdir -p ~/.config/obs-studio/plugins/data
cp -R ./output_dir/share/obs/obs-plugins/obs-localvocal/* ~/.config/obs-studio/plugins/data/

Windows

Use the CI scripts again, for example:

> .github/scripts/Build-Windows.ps1 -Configuration Release

The build should exist in the ./release folder off the root. You can manually install the files in the OBS directory.

> Copy-Item -Recurse -Force "release\Release\*" -Destination "C:\Program Files\obs-studio\"

Building with CUDA support on Windows

LocalVocal will now build with CUDA support automatically through a prebuilt binary of Whisper.cpp from https://github.com/occ-ai/occ-ai-dep-whispercpp. The CMake scripts will download all necessary files.

To build with cuda add CPU_OR_CUDA as an environment variable (with cpu, clblast, 12.2.0 or 11.8.0) and build regularly

> $env:CPU_OR_CUDA="12.2.0"
> .github/scripts/Build-Windows.ps1 -Configuration Release

raux/obs-localvocal