Developer builds on-device real-time translator for Mac using Apple's native macOS 26 frameworks
A developer working at a German company built Wakaru, a macOS menu bar app that generates real-time translated subtitles for any audio playing on a Mac, including meetings, videos, and podcasts. The app was created in response to privacy concerns about existing captioning tools that send audio to external cloud servers. Wakaru runs entirely on-device using three frameworks Apple quietly introduced in macOS 26: SpeechAnalyzer for speech recognition, the Translation framework, and FoundationModels for an optional higher-accuracy LLM-powered translation mode. The app supports speech recognition in 10 languages and can display subtitles in 22 languages, with no account, API keys, or internet connection required. Written in approximately 3,000 lines of Swift with no external dependencies, the developer noted a dramatic speed improvement over an earlier Electron-based prototype, with captions now appearing while a sentence is still being spoken.
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