About PizzaVox and how it works
PizzaVox is a set of free audio tools with one rule and no exceptions: your files never leave your device. Transcribing a meeting, extracting the audio from a video, converting or trimming a file are all things your browser can now do on its own, without sending anything to a server.
The Pizza family
PizzaVox belongs to a small family of sites that share the same philosophy: simple, free, clean tools that respect your privacy. The big sibling is PizzaPDF, for working with PDFs; more are on the way. The project is created and run by Nicola Tesone, in Italy.
How can it all happen in the browser?
Thanks to WebAssembly, a technology that lets modern browsers run programs written for computers at nearly the speed of an installed application. When you use a tool, your browser downloads the program from our servers (and, for transcription, the artificial intelligence model), then works on your file locally. The program stays cached, so later runs start immediately.
- Transcription: whisper.cpp, an efficient version of OpenAI's Whisper speech recognition model.
- Extraction, conversion and trimming: FFmpeg, the audio-video engine used by half the world, in its ffmpeg.wasm build.
How it's funded
PizzaVox is free. Since there are no servers processing files, costs are low; in the future the site may carry a few unobtrusive ads to cover them. Ads will never have access to your files, simply because we don't have them.
Open source software and licences
PizzaVox exists thanks to open source projects. Every component is hosted on our own servers, with no dependency on external CDNs:
| Component | Used for | Licence |
|---|---|---|
| whisper.cpp via Transcribe.js (@transcribe/shout, @transcribe/transcriber) | Transcription | MIT |
| OpenAI's Whisper models (tiny and base, quantised ggml format) | Transcription | MIT |
| ffmpeg.wasm (@ffmpeg/ffmpeg) | Extraction, conversion, trimming | MIT |
| @ffmpeg/core (FFmpeg compiled to WebAssembly, with LAME, libvorbis and other libraries) | Extraction, conversion, trimming | GPL-2.0 or later; source code on GitHub and ffmpeg.org |
| Inter | Typeface | SIL Open Font License 1.1 |
Contact
For questions, bug reports or ideas write to info@pizzavox.com or visit the Contact page.