Case study
KathaCut - AI Caption & Video Editor
A local, offline AI video editor that creates animated captions for Malayalam and English creators - no account, no telemetry.
Overview
Creators who publish in Malayalam struggle with caption tools that mangle the script or need everything uploaded to the cloud. KathaCut is a desktop video toolkit that transcribes on your own machine and produces word-by-word animated captions with correctly shaped Malayalam text — with no account and no telemetry.
Key features
- Local transcription with whisper.cpp, plus optional cloud engines (Gemini, OpenAI, ElevenLabs)
- Word-level animated captions in 5 preset styles, with proper Malayalam text shaping
- Multi-track timeline with picture-in-picture, overlays, masks and zoom
- MP4 export with burned-in captions, plus SRT import and export
- AI dubbing with Gemini text-to-speech or a fully local Kokoro voice
- Optional MCP server so AI assistants can drive editing tasks
Tech stack
- Electron, React 19, Vite and TypeScript
- FFmpeg for rendering and export
- whisper.cpp and sherpa-onnx for on-device speech models
- Google Gemini for optional cloud transcription and TTS
Status
Pre-1.0 desktop app for Windows (x64) and macOS (Apple Silicon). Website: kathacut.app.