ASR Transcribe to Text

Transcribe audio/video to speaker-labeled text. Local execution has two explicit routes. Long or unattended recordings use checkpointed whisper.cpp + Silero VAD blocks, then late-fuse pyannote speakers. Short/medium recordings may use the Qwen3-ASR + mlx-whisper alignment route. Neither route cuts ASR input at diarization turns; speaker attribution happens after continuous-context ASR.

Route before ASR: the transcript is the result, not the run

Before starting transcription, check the owning project's transcript catalog, external source index, and declared prior-work carriers for an existing canonical transcript using source ID, date, title, and entity terms. A verified human-reviewed/current transcript ends the task unless the user explicitly asked for a new independent comparison. Raw audio existing is not a reason to regenerate text that already exists.

When no canonical transcript exists: