Cicada Turns Any Mac Meeting Into Live Translated Notes for Free
Cicada is an open source macOS menubar app that transcribes, translates, and summarizes any meeting or livestream on-device, with push to talk voice interpreting.
- Cicada is an open source macOS menubar app for live subtitles, interpreting, and AI meeting notes, available on GitHub.
- Captures system audio directly, so no bot joins Zoom, Feishu, Tencent Meeting, YouTube, or X Spaces.
- Speech recognition runs on-device via Apple SpeechAnalyzer and SpeechTranscriber, keeping audio local.
- Push-to-talk interpreting routes translated speech back into meetings through the BlackHole 2ch virtual microphone.
- Uses Ant Group's Ling and Ming models for summaries, one-step audio translation, and voice cloning from 8-30 second samples.
- Apache 2.0, Apple Silicon only, macOS 26+, roughly 2-14 US cents per hour of API usage.
Cicada is a free, open-source macOS app that captures audio from Zoom, Google Meet, Feishu, Tencent Meeting, X Spaces, YouTube livestreams, and other sources. It produces bilingual live subtitles, records meetings, generates structured notes, and can route translated speech back into a call through a virtual microphone.
The Swift and SwiftUI project uses the Apache 2.0 license, and its GitHub repository has 83 stars. Apple’s on-device SpeechAnalyzer and SpeechTranscriber APIs handle recognition, while optional cloud models provide summaries, speech-to-speech translation, and voice cloning. The split gives developers a practical reference for combining local speech processing with selective cloud services.
Audio in, translated voice out
macOS’s Screen & System Audio Recording permission lets Cicada capture the sound playing through the computer while omitting screen frames and the app’s own audio output. Because capture happens at the system level, Cicada does not add a recorder bot or participant to the meeting. Users remain responsible for obtaining consent and following applicable recording laws.
Translated replies use a push-to-talk control mapped to the right Option key. Holding the key records the speaker, translates the utterance, and sends synthesized speech to the meeting through BlackHole 2ch, a virtual audio driver. Cicada can download the notarized driver from its official source, verify its hardcoded SHA-256 checksum, and switch the system input to the virtual device during simultaneous interpretation.
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