How do I install the Transcribe skill?

Run npx skillmds@latest add jperrello/transcribe in your terminal (requires Node.js), paste this page's agent-chat prompt into Claude, Cursor, or any MCP-connected agent, or download the SKILL.md file and copy it into your agent's skills directory.

Is Transcribe safe to use?

This skill has not completed SkillMD's automated safety review yet. SkillMD never runs a skill's scripts for you; review the SKILL.md before installing.

Which AI agents work with Transcribe?

This skill is tagged as working with Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex. SKILL.md is an open format, so most agents that read a skills directory can load it too.

Is Transcribe free to use?

Yes. Installing skills from SkillMD is free, and the skill stays under its author's original license.

Who published Transcribe?

jperrello (@jperrello) published this skill. Their other Agent Skills are listed on their SkillMD profile.

Transcribe by jperrello — Agent Skill

Name: Transcribe
Author: jperrello

Transcribe

Transcribe a video/audio file to a JSON transcript with word-level timestamps using local whisper.cpp + a GGML model. Use when you have a media file and need text + word timing for downstream subtitle burning or segment ranking.

jperrello b2eb711 2 files · 4.0 KB Updated Sep 17, 2026

File contents

transcribe

Local whisper.cpp transcription. No API calls.

Inputs

input: path to a video or audio file
out (optional): output JSON path (defaults to <input>.transcript.json)
language (optional): ISO code, default en

Output

JSON shaped as:

{
  "source": "<input path>",
  "language": "en",
  "words": [
    {"t0": 0.42, "t1": 0.81, "w": "hello"},
    ...
  ],
  "segments": [
    {"t0": 0.42, "t1": 4.10, "text": "Hello, welcome to the show."},
    ...
  ]
}

How

Read WHISPER_BIN and WHISPER_MODEL from .env.
If input is video, extract 16kHz mono WAV via ffmpeg -i <in> -ac 1 -ar 16000 -f wav -.
Pipe to whisper-cli --model "$WHISPER_MODEL" --output-json-full --no-prints -l <lang>.
Parse whisper-cli's JSON; flatten tokens into words[], group by segment into segments[].

Run

.claude/skills/transcribe/transcribe.sh <input> [out.json] [lang]

Idempotent: skips work if out is newer than input. Uses --max-len 1 --split-on-word for word-level segments; groups into sentence segments on .!? or every 18 words.

Frequently asked questions