Introduction
I've started this project after fiddling around with Notions "Meeting Notes" feature and running the idea of using a Speech to Text tool for our session transcripts by the members of one of my TTRPG groups.
Consensus was that a tool like this would be nice,nice and mosthelpful peopleto hadn'have good transcripts and a helpful session summary without taking time out of player's lives to compile concise session notes. For me personally, as somebody with an auditory processing disorder, having a live transcript would also be incredibly helpful to be better able to understand what has been said.
Most group members weren't anyconcerned concerns,to use a third-party service, since we wouldn't talk about 'real' or personal stuff, but only a fictional story, concerning fictional characters.
Yet, this solution wouldn't have been ideal and there are real concerns with feeding deeply personal and biometrical information, like a person's voice, to a commercial language model of a company that is based in the USA1.
That's why I started fiddling around with open-source tools and language models that would run strictly local. With no data transferred to big-tech companies. And thus also not providing information to train commercial models.
My hope is, to create a solution by cobbling together open-source tools and some shell scripts. Ideally, this solution will be easily replicable by everybody who knows his way around a UNIX/Linux command line and has a device available with enough computing-power, RAM and/or GPU.
1) And yes, I'm aware of the irony that we already transfer our voices to a US-based service by using Discord voice chat. Doesn't mean one should worsen it.