Posted March 14, 2026 by Hexwright Studios
#subtitles #whisper #offline #origin-story
Scribe wasn't planned. I was working on something completely different when I started thinking about small tools that solve one specific problem.
"Local subtitle generator" was one idea on the list. Drop a video, get subtitles, everything runs on your machine. When I looked into Whisper and found out it supports 99 languages, is MIT licensed, and runs fully offline, my reaction was basically "you are shitting me." Within the same hour it had a name and a project folder.
The thing is, I have history with subtitles. When I was about 12 I got lucky enough to stumble into an MMORPG community where people were patient with a kid who didn't speak English. I picked it up over time, but a lot of people my age and older didn't know proper English, so they just didn't have access to English content because nobody was subtitling it for them.
I found The Leet World, a Counter-Strike: Source machinima webseries, and loved it. I wanted other people to enjoy it too, so I started translating it, along with a few episodes of BBC's Merlin. This was 2006-2007, so I had to do it by hand in Subtitle Workshop, timing every single line manually and writing the translation on top.
A tool like Scribe would have saved 12 year old me so much time. Drop the video in, get a mostly correct base to work from, and spend a fraction of the time cleaning it up instead of doing everything from scratch.
That's why this exists. Not because of market research or a business plan. Because I remember what it felt like to want to share something with people who couldn't understand it, and having no good tools to help.
If you have feature requests or ideas, drop them in the comments. Translation is coming in v2. What comes next is shaped by what you actually need.