Meeting transcripts with speaker labels, on your own PC. Free forever.
A meeting transcriber for Windows that runs entirely on your own PC. It records
your microphone and the sound your computer plays (Teams, Zoom, Meet, a
browser), or imports an audio or video file, and turns it into a transcript
where every line says who spoke. Transcripts live in a local, searchable
database. Nothing is uploaded: there is no account, no cloud, no telemetry, no
paid tier and no licence key.
The speech and speaker models are NVIDIA's open Nemotron models, run by
NVIDIA's NeMo-Speech.cpp runtime on your GPU. No Python, PyTorch or CUDA
toolkit is needed; the GPU driver is the only prerequisite.
| Library and search | A meeting with its speakers |
|---|
| |
| Recording, with live text | Dark theme |
| |
What it does
- Imports recordings (m4a, mp3, wav, flac, ogg, mp4, mkv and more): about
30 times faster than real time on an RTX 3080 (measured over the whole
import), so an hour takes about two minutes.
- Records live: your microphone is "me", the system audio is split into
the other speakers (up to 8). Text appears within about a second; when you
stop, the recording is processed again for the final transcript, with
punctuation.
- Speakers: rename "Speaker 2" to "Alice" once and the name sticks, merge
labels, recolour, fix a line that went to the wrong person.
- Search every transcript at once (accent-insensitive, any language).
- Export Markdown, plain text, JSON, SRT or VTT.
- Keyboard first: R records, Ctrl+K searches, Ctrl+Alt+R records from any
app,
? lists every shortcut.
Quick start
- Download
Diarist_0.1.0-beta.5_x64-setup.exe from the
releases page and run
it. It installs for your user only (no administrator rights) into
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Diarist.
- The first start shows a setup screen: it checks your GPU, driver and free
space, then Install engine (98 MB) and Install recommended models
(1.0 GB): the diarizer, the EN model and the punctuation model. Every
file is checked against its published SHA-256.
- Press Ctrl+O to import a recording, or R to record a meeting.
Using a coding agent (Claude Code, Codex or similar)? Point it at
docs/SETUP-WITH-AN-AGENT.md: it checks your PC,
picks the package and models, installs and verifies.
You can skip the setup ("Set up later"): Import and Record tell you exactly
what is missing when you use them, with a one-click fix. If a download does
not work on your network, every item shows its address, hash and folder, so
you can fetch it with a browser and drop it in. Details, firewalls, offline
machines and uninstalling: docs/INSTALL.md.
The installer is not code-signed yet, so Windows SmartScreen asks before it
runs ("More info", then "Run anyway"). The NVIDIA runtime it downloads is not
signed either; Windows Smart App Control, when it is on, may block it.
Choosing your package and models
From docs/04-model-guide.md. Numbers marked
measured were taken on an RTX 3080 10 GB; the rest are estimates and say so.
What gets downloaded
| Component | What it does | Size | Licence |
|---|
| NeMo-Speech.cpp 0.2.0 (NVIDIA) | The inference runtime | 98 MB zip, 134 MB extracted (CUDA build) | Apache-2.0 |
| Nemotron 3 Diarization, q8_0 | Who spoke when, up to 8 speakers | 102 MB | OpenMDW-1.1 |
| Nemotron Speech Streaming EN 0.6B, q8_0 | Speech to text, English (default) | 668 MB | NVIDIA Open Model License |
| Nemotron 3.5 ASR Streaming 0.6B, q8_0 | Speech to text, 40+ languages (optional) | 742 MB | OpenMDW-1.1 |
| Parakeet TDT 0.6B v3, q8_0 | Experimental only (see below) | 681 MB | CC-BY-4.0 |
| Horizon-Labs punctuation-restoration-small, int8 ONNX, with ONNX Runtime 1.31.0 (Microsoft) | Punctuation and sentence capitals after Stop and on imports, on the CPU; never changes a word | 306 MB | Apache-2.0 as declared in the model card (base model MIT); ONNX Runtime MIT |
The default download (engine, diarizer, EN model, punctuation) is about
1.2 GB; with every optional model, 2.5 GB.
Which runtime package for which PC
The setup screen detects your GPU and preselects the package; you can change it.
| Your GPU | Package | Status |
|---|
| NVIDIA with a driver new enough for CUDA 13 (R580 or newer is the estimate; 610.88 measured working) | CUDA | Measured on an RTX 3080 10 GB; kernels for Turing, Ampere, Ada and Blackwell |
| AMD or Intel, or an older NVIDIA driver | Vulkan (19 MB) | Measured on an RTX 3080 only (AMD and Intel untested): 25 to 28 times real time for files; live works |
| No usable GPU | CPU (6 MB) | Measured 5 times real time on a 12-core Ryzen 9 5900X (an hour in about 12 minutes); live not recommended |
How much GPU memory
Measured on the RTX 3080, not counting the desktop's own use (about 1.5 GB):
| Scenario | VRAM |
|---|
| Live recording, two channels, Nemotron 3.5 and the diarizer | 1.05 GB idle, 1.26 GB with two sessions, spikes of 0.5 to 0.6 GB per session; budget 2 GB (the EN model sits at 1.18 GB) |
| File transcription, Nemotron 3.5 | 1.82 GB peak (77-minute file) |
| File transcription, EN model | 2.6 GB peak |
| Experimental Parakeet | 4.9 GB peak |
| Live recording plus a file job | never at the same time: file jobs wait until recording stops |
Estimated tiers (the app reads free VRAM before it starts, and the live
engine unloads after 10 idle minutes):
| Card | What works |
|---|
| 4 GB | File mode with Nemotron 3.5 (turn on low-VRAM mode); live is borderline next to the desktop's own use |
| 6 GB | Live and file mode comfortably; Parakeet only with nothing else on the GPU |
| 8 GB and up | Everything |
Which speech model
- English meetings: the EN model (default). It keeps more of what was
said: cpWER 4.7 to 9.5 on four English Zoom meetings against 5.1 to 10.3
for Nemotron 3.5, and 18.0 against 20.7 on the AMI meeting (measured).
Speaker attribution is about the same. It drops quiet speech, though: for a
soft-spoken participant or a file recorded at a low level, use Nemotron 3.5.
- Other or mixed languages, or a 4 GB card: Nemotron 3.5. 40+ languages
with automatic detection, 30 percent less VRAM. It drops about 40 percent of
filler words ("um", "uh").
- Parakeet TDT v3 is experimental and off by default. It punctuates well
and is about 0.6 WER points better, but it silently skipped a 46-second span
of a 77-minute recording (measured), and no chunk size avoids it. Use it
only for short clips you check yourself.
Neither Nemotron model punctuates much, so since 0.1.0-beta.5 a small
punctuation model adds . , ? and sentence capitals after Stop and on
imports, on the CPU (about 5 to 6 seconds per hour of audio), without
changing a word; lines end at sentence ends where the pause allows. About two
in three of its periods and question marks are where a person would put
them (docs/04-model-guide.md, section 8). On clean meeting audio expect about
one word in 15 to 20 to be wrong or missing; on far-field room recordings
about one in 9.
Speakers: limits worth knowing
- Speaker diarization is Nemotron 3 Diarization, the best system on the only
independent cross-system benchmark (DER 14.7 against 19 to 31 for the
alternatives). On our own Zoom meetings 0.2 to 0.3 percent of words went to
the wrong speaker, 5.5 to 7.8 percent within a second of a speaker change
with Nemotron 3.5 and 5.6 to 12.7 with the EN model (measured).
- At most 8 speakers per recording. A ninth person is merged into an
existing label; split very long multi-meeting recordings.
- Speaker labels in the live view are provisional; the processing after Stop
produces the stored transcript, and names you gave during the meeting carry
over.
- Heavy overlap, far-field microphones and noisy rooms degrade the result.
Other requirements
- Windows 10 (1803 or newer) or Windows 11, 64-bit. WebView2 is preinstalled
on these; the installer fetches it otherwise.
- About 1.3 GB of disk for the engine and the default models; recordings use
about 90 MB per hour (lossless FLAC), kept 30 days by default (transcripts
are kept forever).
- RAM: the engine uses about 300 MB (measured); 8 GB in total is comfortable.
You own the folders
Like ComfyUI, models and runtimes are plain files in plain folders under the
data folder (%LOCALAPPDATA%\app.diarist.desktop unless you move it in
Settings):
- Drop any GGUF the runtime supports anywhere under
models\ and press
Refresh. The app reads its header to know what it is. Settings, Models also
has Add from URL and Add from file.
- Drop a newer runtime (the zip or the extracted folder) into
engine\, or use
Check for newer runtime in Settings, which lists NVIDIA's releases.
- Diagnostics has a Why isn't it working? checklist with a fix per row, and
Copy diagnostics for a bug report.
Privacy
Everything stays on your computer: audio, transcripts, names, settings. The
app makes network requests only when you ask for a download (the runtime from
GitHub, the models from Hugging Face), when you press Check for newer
runtime (the GitHub API), or when you press Check for updates. It never
checks anything by itself and sends nothing about you. A crash leaves a
report in the data folder's logs folder that is never sent anywhere and is
deleted with the data folder. See PRIVACY.md.
Status
Version 0.1.0-beta.5, the fifth beta pre-release: file
import and live recording work
end to end on the development machine (Windows 11, RTX 3080). The Vulkan and
CPU runtime packages were tested on that machine's NVIDIA card and CPU only,
and machines other than the author's are untested. Next
on the roadmap: better speaker-change handling, and
recognising the same person across meetings
(docs/plans/00-roadmap.md). Changes:
CHANGELOG.md.
Building from source
Rust, bun and the VS Build Tools: see docs/DEV.md and
CONTRIBUTING.md. Design: docs/01-architecture.md.
Licence
MIT for the code in this repository (LICENSE). The runtime
(Apache-2.0), ONNX Runtime (MIT) and the models (OpenMDW-1.1, NVIDIA Open
Model License, CC-BY-4.0, Apache-2.0) are not part of the installer; you
download them at first run under their own licences. The Diarist name, logo and icons are not MIT: use them to refer to
Diarist or to package the official builds, not on forks or other products
(branding/README.md). Third-party notices:
LICENSES.md.
