Lucas WintherandClaude Opus 5.5
e195883b45
Primary users are non-technical people who want Whisper without docs or ML setup; technical users must keep full control as if running it on their own device. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <[email protected]>
56 lines
3.2 KiB
Markdown
56 lines
3.2 KiB
Markdown
# Product
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Whisper Web — on-device speech-to-text. A browser-first transcription app powered by OpenAI Whisper,
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running through [Transformers.js](https://github.com/huggingface/transformers) (`@huggingface/transformers`).
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(Moved here from the original `docs/CLAUDE.md` §1.)
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## Audience
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**Primary: non-technical people** who want Whisper transcription without reading docs or setting up
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any ML tooling themselves. **Also: technical people**, who must be able to do what they want and need
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with it — the same control they'd have running Whisper on their own device.
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What that means for the UI and its copy:
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- **Works with zero knowledge.** Defaults are good enough to just drop a file or press record and get a
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transcript. No step should require knowing what a backend, dtype, or quantization is.
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- **Plain language first.** Labels, statuses, and errors say what is happening and what to do next in
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everyday words ("Downloading the model (~44 MB, one time)", not "Fetching ONNX weights").
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- **Control is there, not in the way.** Technical choices (model size/variant, backend, language, task,
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timestamps, export formats, storage) stay available and honest, but visually secondary — never
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hidden behind a "simple mode" that removes them, and never required.
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- **Technical truth on demand.** Where a technical term is the real answer (WebGPU, WASM, model ids),
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show it alongside the plain description rather than replacing it.
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## Users and what they get
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**Anonymous users (no login) can:**
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- Run Whisper models fully in the browser — no audio or transcript leaves the device.
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- Choose which Whisper model to use (tiny → large, English-only and multilingual, quantized variants).
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- Keep working when the network — or our own server — is offline (installable PWA + cached model weights).
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- Accelerate inference with WebNN or WebGPU (auto-selected in that order, D-017; never WebGPU on
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Firefox, D-026), falling back to WASM automatically.
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- Transcribe an uploaded audio/video file, or live from the microphone (D-016).
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- Export transcripts as `.txt` / `.srt` and manage cached model storage.
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**Logged-in users (Passport.js, when `AUTH_ENABLED`) get all of the above, plus:**
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- A toggle to choose where inference runs: **their own device** (browser engine) or **the server**
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(server engine).
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- The server engine MUST use [faster-whisper](https://github.com/SYSTRAN/faster-whisper) (CTranslate2) —
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not Transformers.js (D-013). faster-whisper cannot run in a browser, so the browser engine stays on
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Transformers.js.
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## Product principles (from `docs/Architecture.md` §5)
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- **Privacy:** browser-engine audio never touches the network.
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- **Anonymous-first:** login only unlocks the server engine; nothing else is gated.
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- **Offline-first:** app shell + previously downloaded models work with no network.
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- **Honest status:** the UI must not claim a state it isn't in — e.g. "Downloading" vs "Loading model
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from cache" (D-033), no "Listening" before the model is ready (D-034).
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- **User-initiated downloads:** selecting a model never downloads it (D-020); large models on mobile
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get a warn/confirm gate (D-027–D-029).
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## Out of scope (from `docs/WorkBreakdown.md`)
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Arbitrary Hub model ids, OAuth providers, multi-user transcript storage, whisper.cpp server backend,
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i18n of the UI.
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