For AI agents
How an AI agent can transcribe audio and video with pktito-cli, without a window or questions.
pktito-cli asks no questions, writes the transcript or JSON to standard output, and reports failures in its exit code and on standard error. Everything runs locally; only the model download reaches the internet. pktito.net/llms.txt summarizes this page.
Install
pktito-cli comes with the app’s installers. These addresses always give the latest release:
| System | Installer | pktito-cli |
|---|---|---|
| macOS | https://pktito.net/download/macos |
/Applications/pktito.app/Contents/MacOS/pktito-cli |
| Windows | https://pktito.net/download/windows (x64), https://pktito.net/download/windows-arm64 |
On the PATH, in a new terminal |
| Linux | https://pktito.net/download/linux-deb (x86-64), https://pktito.net/download/linux-deb-arm64 |
/usr/bin/pktito-cli |
On Linux, install the .deb with apt (sudo apt install ./pktito_*.deb) so that ffmpeg, which pktito-cli reads files through there, comes with it.
Transcribe
pktito-cli download parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2 # once: 624 MB, prints the model's path
pktito-cli -q --json talk.mp4 # the transcript, as JSON on stdout
download retries while the network is away, so give it a time limit. Use parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3 (648 MB) for the 25 European languages. Without --json, the output is plain text, one sentence a line.
The JSON’s segments hold the sentences, each with start, end, text and its words; times are in seconds. pktito-cli has every field and the exit codes.
Failures to expect
no model yet: … pktito-cli download parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2: run that download.Install ffmpeg to read audio and video here: on Linux, install ffmpeg.
Other messages are explained in Troubleshooting.