Lugs

Lugs is a real-time captioning and transcription app built by a team that includes hearing-impaired developers, designed around the specific needs of that community. It transcribes audio from a computer's microphone or system audio and displays live captions on screen, processing everything on-device rather than sending audio to the cloud. That local processing is central to its pitch: no internet connection is required, and conversations stay private because nothing leaves the user's machine. The tool is described as adapting to conversational context to improve transcription accuracy, rather than treating each utterance in isolation. Beyond live captioning for conversations, it's positioned for capturing lecture notes, meetings, and other multimedia audio where an accurate, private transcript is useful. It currently ships as a macOS app. Pricing is a one-time payment of $15 for a lifetime license, which includes future updates — a notably different model from the subscription pricing common among cloud-based transcription tools. One limitation is platform coverage: the app is built for macOS, and the site does not specify Windows, Linux, or mobile support, so users on other operating systems cannot currently use it.