Audio Scribe

AudioScribe

Turn speech into text through AudioScribe, which fronts three swappable transcription backends plus one endpoint built for multi-track Audacity and Craig recordings. Every endpoint takes a multipart file upload and returns a Markdown transcript.

When to activate

• The user hands you an audio or video file and wants what was said.
• The user asks for meeting notes, action items, or a summary from a recording rather than from text.
• The file is a multi-track .zip from Audacity or a Craig bot dump and needs speaker attribution.
• The user asks for timestamps against spoken content.

When not to activate

• Pulling text out of a web page or a URL, use ascend-web-hunter.
• Storing a fact from the transcript so it survives the conversation, use ascend-memory.
• Formatting the finished transcript into a human-facing document, use markdown-writer.

Take the base URL from configuration, never from a guess

Read the base URL from whatever configuration surface the runtime provides for AudioScribe. It differs between a host install, a container, and a remote deployment. Ask the user when nothing is configured. Examples below use $BASE as the placeholder. A configured value might look like http://audio-scribe.local:8080, shown here only as an example of the shape, with the real value always coming from the user's own configuration.

Pass: resolve the base URL from configuration, then use it as $BASE in every call.

Fail: assume a default host and port and upload the user's recording to whatever answers.

Use the four endpoints under /api/v1/transcribe

The default response is the transcript file itself. Set stream=true for a server-sent-events progress stream that ends with a download_url you fetch from /api/v1/transcribe/download/{file_id}. The /audacity endpoint extracts each track, transcribes it with the backend you name, and merges the results into [HH:MM:SS] [Speaker] … lines.

Pass: POST /audacity with a Craig .zip so speakers stay attributed.

Fail: unzip the Craig dump yourself and post one track at a time to /local, which loses the chronological merge.

Pick the backend from privacy, length, and speaker count

Default to local: it is free, keeps the audio on the host, and supports timestamps whenever a GPU is available. Switch to openai for a short, non-sensitive clip where general-purpose quality matters most and timestamps do not. Reach for hf only when the user pins a specific Hugging Face model. Send anything multi-speaker, and every Discord or Craig recording, to /audacity.

Pass: a confidential hour-long interview goes to /local with with_timestamps=true.

Fail: a confidential recording goes to /openai because it is a little faster.

Local backend with timestamps, Bash:

curl -s -o transcript.md -X POST $BASE/api/v1/transcribe/local -F "file=@meeting.m4a" -F "with_timestamps=true"

Local backend with timestamps, PowerShell:

curl.exe -s -o transcript.md -X POST $BASE/api/v1/transcribe/local -F "file=@meeting.m4a" -F "with_timestamps=true"

Hosted backend with the language forced, Bash:

curl -s -o transcript.md -X POST $BASE/api/v1/transcribe/openai -F "file=@voice-note.mp3" -F "language=en"

Hosted backend with the language forced, PowerShell:

curl.exe -s -o transcript.md -X POST $BASE/api/v1/transcribe/openai -F "file=@voice-note.mp3" -F "language=en"

Multi-track zip with a chronological speaker merge, Bash:

curl -s -o transcript.md -X POST $BASE/api/v1/transcribe/audacity -F "file=@session.zip" -F "provider=local"

Multi-track zip with a chronological speaker merge, PowerShell:

curl.exe -s -o transcript.md -X POST $BASE/api/v1/transcribe/audacity -F "file=@session.zip" -F "provider=local"

Call curl.exe in PowerShell so the shell does not route the name to its Invoke-WebRequest alias.

Stream long files instead of blocking on one request

Long recordings take real time, so raise the client timeout to ten minutes or more for anything approaching an hour and set stream=true so the user watches progress instead of a hung request. The stream emits {"type":"progress",…} events and ends with {"type":"complete","download_url":"/api/v1/transcribe/download/<id>"}, which you fetch from $BASE to get the Markdown.

Pass: an hour-long podcast goes out with stream=true and a ten-minute client timeout.

Fail: the same file goes out on a default 30-second timeout and the request dies mid-transcription.

Streaming progress, Bash:

curl -N -X POST $BASE/api/v1/transcribe/local -F "file=@long-podcast.mp3" -F "stream=true"

Streaming progress, PowerShell:

curl.exe -N -X POST $BASE/api/v1/transcribe/local -F "file=@long-podcast.mp3" -F "stream=true"

Pass the language when you know it, and never ask for API keys

Set language whenever the user names it or the file makes it obvious, because auto-detection spends the first chunk identifying the language instead of transcribing it. Credentials for the hosted backends are configured on the server, so asking the user for a key is both unnecessary and a way to end up with a secret in a transcript.

Pass: -F "language=pl" on a Polish voice note.

Fail: prompt the user to paste an API key so the hosted backend can run.

Related skills

• ascend-web-hunter for text that lives on a web page rather than in a recording.
• ascend-memory for storing a durable fact you extracted from a transcript.
• markdown-writer for turning a raw transcript into a document a person reads.

Checklist

• Base URL resolved from configuration, not from a default.
• Backend chosen from privacy, clip length, and speaker count, with local as the default.
• Multi-track and Craig recordings sent to /audacity rather than split by hand.
• language set whenever it is known.
• stream=true and a raised client timeout on anything long.
• No API key requested from the user.