Skip to main content

​
Backends

Two transcription backends are available. Admins can switch between them at runtime via the System page in the web app — no code deployment needed.

​
Local (Whisper.cpp)

Runs entirely on the worker machine. Audio never leaves your infrastructure.
  • Model files must be present in the ai_models/ volume
  • The worker must restart to load the model (switching back to local from Foresight requires a restart)
  • Accuracy depends on the model size loaded

​
Foresight (remote inference)

Audio is posted to an OpenAI-compatible endpoint ({base_url}/audio/transcriptions). Results come back in verbose_json format with word-level timestamps.
  • Faster and generally more accurate than local models
  • Requires network access to the Foresight cluster
  • base_url and api_key are set in config.yml — not editable from the admin UI (security boundary)
  • The realtime model and final model can be set separately from the admin UI
Size limit: Foresight rejects uploads larger than 200 MiB. Long sessions must use chunked upload — a single-file upload of a multi-hour recording will fail.

​
Diarisation (speaker labelling)

Diarisation assigns a speaker label (S1, S2, etc.) to each transcript segment so you know who said what. Important: Diarisation only runs on the final full-audio transcription — never on individual chunks. Enabling diarisation on a chunk-based recording has no effect until finalisation. When Foresight diarisation is enabled, pyannote still runs locally to compute voiceprint embeddings for cross-session speaker identity — but its labels are mapped to match Foresight’s output. If diarisation is disabled, segments still get speaker labels from Foresight but no identity matching runs.

​
Runtime configuration (admin)

Admins can change the following at runtime from Admin → System → Transcription: base_url and api_key are config-file only — not exposed in the admin UI.

​
Transcript format

Transcripts are stored as structured segments:
Speaker labels are stable within a session. Cross-session identity (knowing S1 in session A is the same person as S1 in session B) requires voiceprint matching, which runs when diarisation is enabled.

​
Re-running failed transcription

Individual failed chunk jobs can be re-run from Admin → Jobs → Transcriptions. Select the session, expand the chunk group, and click “Re-run” on the failed chunk.