TapScribe

Local transcription recorder and operator dashboard. TapScribe records one WAV per utterance per speaker over a WebSocket, runs Whisper / Voxtral / Parakeet batch transcription on demand, and supervises a WhisperLiveKit child process for live captions. Nothing leaves the machine.

Audio arrives via a bridge — usually a browser extension that taps the meeting platform's audio tracks and streams raw PCM to the /tap WebSocket. The included bridges/spacialchat-bridge/ targets spatial.chat; see bridges/README.md for the wire protocol.

Beyond record + transcribe: a hallucination filter (substring / exact: / re: rules; suppressed segments kept in an audit array), silence-stripping (trimmed copies in <session>/stripped/, originals untouched), summarization (bundled local model, operator CLI, or an OpenAI-compatible API), a People registry (cross-session speaker identity → display name, with merge/detach), and an end-of-meeting pipeline (strip → transcribe → summarize as one job a Bridge can trigger and poll with the tap token — no operator in the loop). CONTEXT.md has the domain model.

Dashboard

One operator console at / — the "Stages" UI. A slim left spine navigates the global views (Taps · Sessions · People · Settings) and the per-session journey (Capture → Recordings → Transcript → Summary); the active-taps rail follows you across views. Live captions stream in Capture; silence-stripping and the per-WAV files live in Recordings; the ▶ transcribe range button, the meeting-languages declaration (ADR-0011), and the merged transcript live in Transcript; the live and batch engine pickers live in Settings.

Captured live by the browser E2E test: the Apollo 11 fixture through the bridge and a real faster-whisper tiny.en. Bigger models clean up the self-flagged low-confidence output considerably.

Quick start (macOS / Linux)

bash start.sh             # localhost only
bash start.sh --lan       # bind 0.0.0.0

The script finds Python 3.12+, creates .venv, base-installs the package, and launches the recorder on port 8001. Pick transcription models in the browser at http://localhost:8001/setup (/ redirects there until a model is installed); /setup doubles as the manage-models surface. Other flags: --non-interactive (headless — install the saved/default model selection without the browser), --no-mlx (skip MLX on Apple Silicon; live and batch both use MLX there by default), --auto-live (boot with live captions running), --tls, --no-auth (dev only).

Live captions are off by default: start whisperlivekit-server from the dashboard. The recorder supervises it as a child on an ephemeral internal port (pin one with SX_PORT_WLK); child logs are prefixed [wlk]. Ctrl+C stops the recorder and any child.

On first run two secrets are generated and printed:

• a dashboard password for HTTP Basic auth, persisted to .auth-password;
• a /tap bearer token for bridges, persisted to .tap-token — paste it into the bridge popup along with host and port.

Rotate with .venv/bin/tapscribe --rotate-password / --rotate-tap-token. start.sh --tls serves https:// + wss:// with a self-signed cert generated on first boot (.tapscribe-cert.pem, .tapscribe-key.pem) and reused after; to supply your own, run tapscribe directly with --tls --cert <path> --key <path> (recorder flags, not start.sh flags).

Windows

Windows Bundle (no Python needed)

Download TapScribe-Setup-win-x64.exe from the latest release and run it. Per-user install (no admin prompt), carries its own interpreter; a tray icon starts the dashboard and its Copy password item gives you the generated login. The Bundle is unsigned, so SmartScreen warns — click More info → Run anyway. Program files land in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\TapScribe; recordings, transcripts and settings live in %USERPROFILE%\TapScribe and survive uninstall; model weights cache in %USERPROFILE%\.cache\huggingface. See packaging/README.md and ADR-0015.

From a checkout (developers)

.\start.ps1        # flags mirror start.sh: -Lan, -NoMlx, -AutoLive, -Tls, -NonInteractive

Other installs

• PyPI: pip install tapscribe, then tapscribe. Models still install via /setup.
• Docker (CPU-only): docker run --rm -it -p 8001:8001 -v "$PWD/data:/data" ghcr.io/vortiago/tapscribe:latest

Configuration

Editable config files live under config/ and are re-read on every job; all are editable from the dashboard's Settings view (further knobs — chunk sizes, timeouts, model idle TTL — live under Settings → Advanced).

Architecture

One backend, one supervised child, N bridges. Audio flows in over WebSocket; captions and recordings come out.

flowchart LR
    subgraph Meeting["Meeting platform (e.g. spatial.chat)"]
        Bridge["Bridge<br/>(browser extension<br/>or native helper)"]
    end

    subgraph Host["TapScribe host"]
        Backend["TapScribe backend<br/>FastAPI :8001<br/>/tap · /api · dashboard"]
        WLK["whisperlivekit-server<br/>(supervised child, internal port)"]
        WAVs[("recordings/<br/>&lt;session&gt;/*.wav")]
    end

    Operator["Operator browser<br/>(dashboard)"]

    Bridge -- "PCM 16k mono<br/>over WS /tap" --> Backend
    Backend -- "forwards PCM" --> WLK
    WLK -- "settled live captions" --> Backend
    Backend -- "one WAV per utterance" --> WAVs
    Operator <-- "HTTPS (500 ms /api/state poll)" --> Backend

One /tap WebSocket = one utterance. Each PCM frame is tee'd: appended to the per-utterance WAV on disk and relayed to the WhisperLiveKit child for live captions. The two sinks are independent — if WhisperLiveKit is down, recording still works. Bridges never talk to the child directly.

Backends

Tests

pip install -e ".[dev]"
python -m pytest -q

Unit + route tests (backends stubbed, under 20 s), an HTTP pipeline E2E over real /tap WebSockets, a real-Whisper E2E on committed CC-licensed fixtures, a Playwright dashboard-UI E2E, and a headed bridge-extension E2E. See CONTRIBUTING.md for how to run each layer. GitHub Actions runs the suite and ruff on every push and PR across Python 3.12-3.14 on Ubuntu, macOS, and Windows.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.