Saidwire/saidwire-mcp

Speech-to-text for Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, VS Code and any other
Model Context Protocol client. Ask your assistant to
transcribe a recording on your computer or at a public URL, and get plain text, subtitles
(SRT/VTT) or word-level timestamps back.
> "Transcribe ~/Downloads/standup.m4a and list the action items."
> "Make subtitles for https://example.com/talk.mp3 and save them to ~/talk.srt."
English speech-to-text, punctuated and capitalised.
WAV, MP3, FLAC, Ogg/Opus, WebM, M4A/MP4 and AAC, up to 100 MB / 60 minutes per file.
$0.30 per audio hour. New keys include 120 free hours, no card needed.
Built and maintained by Saidwire, the company that runs the service.
## 1. Get a free API key
Sign up at saidwire.com/dev and copy your key
(it starts with sklive).
## 2. Add the server to your client
You need uv (it provides uvx;
no Node or npm needed):
bash
curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh # macOS / Linux
# Windows: powershell -c "irm https://astral.sh/uv/install.ps1 | iex"
### Claude Desktop
Settings → Developer → Edit Config (claudedesktopconfig.json), then restart Claude:
json
"mcpServers": {
"saidwire": {
"command": "uvx",
"args": ["saidwire-mcp"],
"env": { "SAIDWIREAPIKEY": "skliveyourkeyhere" }
If Claude says it cannot find uvx, replace "uvx" with the full path from which uvx
(it usually ends in /.local/bin/uvx). Desktop apps do not always see your shell's PATH.
Or double-click saidwire-mcp.mcpb (from the GitHub release) to install it as a Claude
Desktop extension; Claude asks for the key.
### Claude Code
bash
claude mcp add saidwire --scope user -e SAIDWIREAPIKEY=skliveyourkeyhere -- uvx saidwire-mcp
### Cursor
~/.cursor/mcp.json (all projects) or .cursor/mcp.json (one project):
json
"mcpServers": {
"saidwire": {
"command": "uvx",
"args": ["saidwire-mcp"],
"env": { "SAIDWIREAPIKEY": "skliveyourkeyhere" }
### Windsurf
~/.codeium/windsurf/mcpconfig.json: the same mcpServers block as Cursor.
### VS Code (Copilot agent mode)
.vscode/mcp.json:
json
"inputs": [
{ "type": "promptString", "id": "saidwire-key", "description": "Saidwire API key", "password": true }
],
"servers": {
"saidwire": {
"command": "uvx",
"args": ["saidwire-mcp"],
"env": { "SAIDWIREAPIKEY": "${input:saidwire-key}" }
### Any other client
Command uvx saidwire-mcp (stdio transport), with SAIDWIREAPIKEY in its environment.
pip install saidwire-mcp also works and installs a saidwire-mcp command.
## Tools
| tool | what it does |
| transcribefile(path, format="text", includewords=false, outputpath=null) | Transcribes an audio file on this computer. Use an absolute path. |
| transcribeurl(url, format="text", includewords=false, outputpath=null) | Downloads a public audio file (direct http/https link) and transcribes it. |
format: text (plain transcript), json (transcript, utterances and per-word
timestamps), srt or vtt (subtitles).
includewords: add per-word start and end times to text or json output.
outputpath: also save the result to this absolute path (for example ~/talk.srt).