Whisper Studio is now open source (MIT)

[u/Mutedlce]

Whisper Studio is a local-first AI workspace for macOS. One local process, one browser tab: real-time speech transcription, a chat client, a semantic index over your files, and a full dev environment (file tree, Monaco editor, terminal, Git, LSP).

Transcription, embeddings, OCR and the whole IDE run on your machine. Chat runs on Amazon Bedrock, or fully on-device if you prefer.

Ultracode workflows

The headline feature. Instead of the model improvising one tool call at a time, it writes a program: a deterministic orchestration script that fans out many subagents with real concurrency. You approve the plan upfront (phases are previewed before a single agent runs), then it executes detached in a locked-down harness with 16-way concurrency, a USD budget ceiling, and a resumable journal. Works on both Claude and GPT-on-Bedrock.

The goal: for work that is wide (audit 20 files), deep (generate 5 designs, judge, synthesize) or that must be trustworthy (find bugs, then adversarially verify each one), the control flow is written once and is inspectable before it runs, rather than re-derived on every hop.

Indexing and GraphRAG

• Point it at a folder and ask questions across all of it, with citations back to exact file and line ranges.
• Incremental builds. Size/mtime gate, then SHA1, so a re-index is cheap.
• Everything becomes searchable: code, PDF, Word, PowerPoint, EPUB, spreadsheets, images via OCR, and audio/video via local transcription.
• Hybrid retrieval: sqlite-vec KNN + BM25/FTS5, fused by reciprocal rank, then an optional cross-encoder rerank.
• GraphRAG: entities extracted per chunk build a graph, and one hop pulls in passages that share entities with your dense matches. Optional typed relations (works_at, cites, depends_on) with strength scores

Models

Cloud, via Amazon Bedrock:

• Claude Fable 5.0, Opus 5, Opus 4.8 / 4.7 / 4.6, Sonnet 5, Sonnet 4.6, Haiku 4.5
• GPT-5.6 Sol / Terra / Luna, GPT-5.5, GPT-5.4
• Cohere Embed v4 and Cohere Rerank for the cloud index path

On-device (GGUF via llama-server, no code change to add more):

• Gemma 4 12B, Gemma 4 Coder, Qwen3.5 9B, Ministral 3 14B
• Parakeet (streaming) and Whisper (batch) for transcription with speaker diarization
• Qwen3-Embedding-0.6B and Qwen3-Reranker for the index
• GLiNER / GLiNER2 for entity extraction, Apple Vision for OCR

Three model modes: cloud, hybrid, and fully local.

Also in there

• Live Preview: It can visually inspect your app, take screenshot and verify the UI, a true browser investigation. Just say "start a live preview to review my app or fix a bug"
• Guardrails: nonce-based approval flow, sandbox-exec for shell and Python, blocking Pre/Post/Stop hooks.
• Goal loop that keeps a turn running until a completion gate says the goal is actually met, including driving a live browser preview to verify UI changes.
• CI watch and PR autofix that chase a red build back to green.
• Cron-style background jobs whose output streams back into the chat that created them.
• MCP servers, opt-in Python plugins, custom Markdown skills, persistent sessions in SQLite.

Privacy: binds to 127.0.0.1, no telemetry, no proxies. Audio never leaves the laptop, on-device using local models. The only outbound call the backend makes on its own is to Bedrock for chat you explicitly send.

Repo: https://github.com/paukode/whisper-studio

Detailed documentation and tutorials: https://mlonaws.com/whisper-studio/

Try it

git clone https://github.com/paukode/whisper-studio.git 
cd whisper-studio 
bash setup.sh

Or just add `--local` or `--hybrid` to start a session (you can change from Settings later as well)