Cicada: open-source live meeting subtitles, notes and speech-to-speech interpreting

Cross-language meetings hurt three times: no subtitles for the language you don’t speak, notes taken by hand, and a mental translation round before every turn you take. Cicada — recommended by dotey on November 5, 2025 — is an open-source app (Apache-2.0, 1,405 stars as of November 5, repo created November 1) that does all three at once: live bilingual subtitles for any call or stream, structured notes written as it listens, and speech-to-speech interpreting — hold the talk key (right ⌥ on Mac, right Ctrl on Windows), speak, and the other side hears the translated voice in the meeting.

Core features

• Live bilingual subtitles: reads system audio directly, no bot in the meeting, invisible to other participants; works with Zoom, Tencent Meeting, Feishu, X Spaces and YouTube.
• Push-to-talk interpreting: the translation reaches the meeting through a virtual microphone, end to end from your machine.
• Structured notes: written while listening; the summary is ready when the call ends.
• Fully on-device on Mac: speech recognition stays on the computer — usable for privacy-sensitive calls.
• Four platforms: macOS 14.4+ (Apple silicon), Windows 10 2004+, Ubuntu 22.04+, Android 10+.

Typical use cases

• Bilingual team meetings: daily stand-ups in mixed Chinese-English, subtitles and notes landing together.
• Foreign-language streams: X Spaces and YouTube with live Chinese subtitles.
• Speaking across languages: you speak Chinese; the other side hears interpreted speech — both directions covered.

Quick start

Download the installer for your platform from cicada.indaloop.app (all four platforms), grant system-audio access, and open any meeting or stream — subtitles appear. Notes archive per meeting inside the app for later search, and the interpreting voice trails your sentence by roughly a phrase, which the project describes as near-simultaneous (their claim — test with your own audio).

Summary

Cicada fits bilingual-heavy teams and people who follow foreign-language streams; multi-party setups where every participant installs and cooperates are out of scope — it is a single-machine tool, and whoever installs it benefits. Facts and limits: Apache-2.0, Swift-led, free and open on all four platforms; Mac on-device recognition needs Apple silicon, while the Windows/Linux/Android clients use cloud recognition — meeting audio crosses the network there, so evaluate for sensitive calls. It compresses subtitles, notes and interpreting into one local app; the desktop-agent entries on this site (vercel-agent-desktop, terminal-mac) build desktop inlets for agents, while Cicada ships agent abilities — listening, note-taking, translating — as an app anyone can install. Notes archive locally per meeting rather than on a vendor cloud, and retention is a settings decision you control.