v4.0.0

Version 4.0 gives MeetingDebrief a second transcription engine, teaches it the words it keeps getting wrong, and gets out of your way while it works. Parakeet arrives as a preview alongside Whisper, Vocabulary replaces the old word-replacement list with something that actually learns, and long transcriptions and summaries now run in the background so the app stays usable while they do.

Highlights

A second transcription engine: Parakeet (Preview)

MeetingDebrief is no longer Whisper-only. Parakeet TDT v3 (Multilingual) — NVIDIA's 0.6B speech model — is now available as a second engine, covering 25 languages including English and Dutch, with punctuation, capitalization and word timestamps built in.

Download it from Settings → Models (~714 MB) and pick Use. It runs entirely on your machine, like everything else here: no cloud inference, no Python environment, no ONNX install, no NVIDIA GPU required. On Apple silicon it runs on the GPU via Metal. Live captions work too — Parakeet listens in buffered windows and revises what it heard as more audio arrives, so captions firm up as you talk.

Your existing setup is untouched. Whisper stays selected if that's what you're using, each recording remembers the model that produced it, and the final transcript flows into the same corrections, summaries, chat, search, export and Markdown mirror as before.

This is a preview, please let me know how it behaves.

Vocabulary: teach it your jargon once

Names, acronyms, product names and internal shorthand are exactly what local speech models mangle. The old Word Replacements list handled that after the fact. Vocabulary replaces it with something that works at three points at once: it primes Whisper before it listens, corrects the transcript as it's saved, and explains your terms to the model that writes summaries and answers chat questions — so "WHOOP" stops becoming "hoop", and the summary knows what it is.

Terms carry a meaning and any number of aliases, and the list grows as you work:

• From your edits — fix a word in a transcript and MeetingDebrief offers to remember it: "Always fix 'Kubernetis' → 'Kubernetes'?"
• From your transcripts — select a term in any transcript and add it straight from the floating chip.
• From the AI — Suggest terms reads a meeting and proposes the product names, acronyms and jargon it found.

Your existing word replacements move over automatically. Regex, substring and case-sensitive rules stay exactly as they were, now under Advanced corrections inside the Vocabulary panel.

Transcription and summarization run in the background

Starting a transcription or a summary no longer blocks the app. Both now run as background jobs with live progress and a Cancel button, so you can browse other meetings, take notes, or start a recording while a long transcript is still processing — and the progress follows you around the app rather than living in one view. Sessions can no longer get stuck in "summarizing" when something fails, and on Windows the worker processes no longer flash up console windows.

Force a language when detection gets it wrong

Whisper occasionally misidentifies similar languages — Finnish read as Swedish will derail an entire transcript. Re-transcribe is now a split button: the main half re-runs with auto-detection, and the attached caret opens a searchable language picker to force the right one. The detected language shows in the session header, and the sidebar gives each meeting a distinct icon for awaiting transcription, in progress, error, and done.

When the selected model won't honour a forced language, the picker now says so instead of silently ignoring the choice — Parakeet always auto-detects, and an English-only Whisper build is pinned to English.

Summaries tell you when they're out of date

Transcripts now carry a revision number, and every summary records the version it was written from. Edit a transcript or re-transcribe a meeting and its existing summaries are flagged "Transcript changed — regenerate summary" rather than quietly describing a transcript that no longer exists.

Other improvements & fixes

• NEW: The floating recorder gets an Open main window button, so you can jump back to the app without going through the tray menu.
• NEW: The local API can be exposed on your whole network instead of just this machine — off by default, in Settings → API. Useful for integrations running on another device; leave it off if you don't need it.
• NEW: Vocabulary is reachable from the local REST API, so connected tools can read and add terms.
• Vocabulary terms can be imported and exported as plain text, so a shared team glossary is a copy-paste away.
• FIXED: Summaries could hang before they even started on Windows machines that silently drop loopback connections — the first readiness check to the summarization engine waited forever, and the stuck job kept the "busy" flag set, so no further summary could run even after cancelling. Those checks are now bounded and cancellable.
• FIXED: License activation against an unreachable server hung indefinitely instead of reporting a network error. License requests now time out and fail fast.
• FIXED: Opening MeetingDebrief could start a second copy when the previous instance's handshake file was gone (macOS) or the running copy was elevated (Windows). Two copies shared one database and fought over the API port, which broke the MuteDeck integration. A lock file in the app data folder now settles it, and restarting after an update is no longer mistaken for a duplicate launch.
• FIXED: Live captions survive a window reload and recover if the transcription worker crashes, instead of going silent for the rest of the recording.
• FIXED: Cancelling a transcription no longer publishes a partial transcript or leaves the session in a stale state.