ora

Ora is an AI translation tool that provides real-time, on-device speech translation for Mac, acting as a personal simultaneous interpreter that runs entirely on Apple Silicon. You speak in one language and live translations stream into a floating caption card while you are still talking, with rolling partials committed after a short silence. Ora's pipeline runs four stages locally: an AVAudioEngine microphone captures 16 kHz audio, Silero voice-activity detection handles endpointing, on-device speech recognition runs on the Metal GPU, and an on-device LLM translates streaming tokens into the caption card. Because every stage runs via MLX Swift on the Metal GPU, nothing leaves your Mac — the site states zero bytes of audio uploaded, zero telemetry events, and no accounts required, and invites users to verify with Little Snitch. This makes Ora usable offline on an airplane, subway, or mountain trail wherever the Mac works, with partial latency around 600 ms. The on-device LLM is tuned for streaming captions and handles idioms, technical terms, and nuance across many languages. Ora is free forever with no accounts, subscriptions, or ads, and is distributed with a GitHub repository. For privacy-conscious Mac users who need live cross-language conversation without sending audio to the cloud, Ora offers a local, account-free interpreter.

Privacy-conscious Mac users use Ora for real-time, offline speech translation during conversations, travel, and multilingual meetings.