Apple quietly shipped everything you need to build a real-time translator — so I built one

I work at a German company. Meetings are in German, sometimes English — and even though I speak both, there are moments in fast meetings where I zone out for two seconds and think: wait, what did they just say?

I couldn't use any of the existing captioning tools, because they all pipe your meeting audio to a cloud server. Sending confidential work calls to a third party was a non-starter.

Then I realized something: macOS 26 quietly shipped every building block you need for a real-time translator. On-device speech recognition (SpeechAnalyzer), on-device machine translation (Translation framework), and an on-device LLM (FoundationModels / Apple Intelligence). No servers, no API keys, no per-minute fees.

So I built Wakaru — a menu bar app that turns any audio playing on your Mac into movie-style translated subtitles, in real time.

TL;DR