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Announcing OpenTranscribe v0.1.0 - Our First Official Release

· 6 min read
OpenTranscribe Team
OpenTranscribe Team
OpenTranscribe Development Team

We're excited to officially announce the first release of OpenTranscribe! Version 0.1.0 marks a significant milestone in our journey from a weekend experiment to a production-ready AI transcription platform.

Six Months of Innovation​

What started in May 2025 as a simple weekend experiment has evolved into something far beyond our initial vision. What we expected to be a couple of weeks of development on nights and weekends turned into six months of passionate development, fueled by rapidly improving AI models and the incredible capabilities of modern development tools.

Impressively, the AI models got better throughout our development cycle, allowing us to add features we hadn't initially planned for. The speed of development, aided by frontier AI models from commercial providers, enabled us to build a comprehensive platform with all the core features we set out to create - and then some.

Why v0.1.0? Our Path to v1.0.0​

We're starting with version 0.1.0 rather than 1.0.0 for good reason. This gives us room to iterate, gather feedback, and make improvements based on real-world usage. We're working towards an official v1.0.0 release and will do our best to ensure backwards compatibility along the way.

Important: While we strive for stability, we cannot guarantee backwards compatibility until we reach v1.0.0. We will clearly announce any breaking changes in our release notes.

This approach allows us to:

  • Gather community feedback on the current feature set
  • Identify and fix issues in real-world deployments
  • Refine the user experience based on actual usage patterns
  • Make necessary architectural improvements before committing to long-term API stability

Protecting Open Source with AGPL-3.0​

One of the most important decisions we made for this release was changing our license from MIT to the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 (AGPL-3.0).

Why AGPL-3.0?​

We believe strongly in open source software and want to ensure OpenTranscribe remains truly open and accessible to everyone. The AGPL-3.0 license protects the open source nature of this project in several key ways:

  1. Network Copyleft Protection - Unlike traditional open source licenses, AGPL-3.0 ensures that users accessing OpenTranscribe over a network have the right to access the source code. This is crucial for a web-based application.

  2. Preventing Proprietary Forks - If someone modifies OpenTranscribe and offers it as a service, they must make their modifications available under the same AGPL-3.0 license. This ensures improvements benefit the entire community.

  3. Protecting Developers - The license provides clear terms that protect both users and developers, ensuring everyone knows their rights and responsibilities.

  4. Ensuring Transparency - Users have the right to know what code is running when they use software, especially when processing sensitive content like transcriptions.

  5. Building a Stronger Community - By requiring modifications to remain open, we foster a collaborative environment where improvements are shared with everyone.

What This Means for You​

You can still:

  • Use OpenTranscribe for personal projects
  • Use it commercially in your business
  • Modify the code to fit your needs
  • Deploy it on your infrastructure
  • Build products and services using it

You must:

  • Keep the source code open if you modify and deploy it as a network service
  • Provide access to the source code to users of your deployed instance
  • Maintain the AGPL-3.0 license on modifications

You don't need to:

  • Open source your own applications that simply use OpenTranscribe's API
  • Share internal modifications if you're not offering it as a service to others

The AGPL-3.0 license aligns with our values of transparency, collaboration, and community-driven development. It ensures OpenTranscribe will always remain open source, even as it's adopted and modified by others.

What's in v0.1.0?​

This release includes all the core features we envisioned and more:

🎧 Professional-Grade Transcription​

  • 70x realtime speed on GPU with high-accuracy WhisperX
  • Word-level timestamps for precise navigation
  • 50+ languages with automatic translation
  • Support for audio and video files up to 4GB

👥 Intelligent Speaker Management​

  • Automatic speaker diarization using state-of-the-art AI
  • Cross-video speaker recognition with voice fingerprinting
  • Global speaker profiles that persist across recordings
  • AI-powered speaker name suggestions using conversation context
  • Detailed speaker analytics and interaction patterns

🤖 AI-Powered Insights​

  • Multi-provider LLM integration (OpenAI, Claude, vLLM, Ollama, and more)
  • BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front) format summaries
  • Custom AI prompts with flexible schemas
  • Intelligent handling of transcripts of any length
  • Both local (privacy-first) and cloud AI options

🔍 Advanced Search & Discovery​

  • Hybrid keyword and semantic search
  • 9.5x faster vector search with OpenSearch 3.3.1
  • Advanced filtering by speaker, tags, collections, and more
  • Interactive waveform visualization
  • Collections for organizing related media

⚡ Enterprise-Ready Infrastructure​

  • Docker Compose orchestration with multiple environment profiles
  • Multi-GPU scaling for high-throughput systems
  • Specialized work queues for optimal performance
  • Complete offline/airgapped deployment support
  • Non-root container security
  • Comprehensive monitoring and logging

Use Open Source Models​

One of our core principles is the use of open source AI models wherever possible. OpenTranscribe leverages:

  • WhisperX - Open source speech recognition
  • PyAnnote.audio - Open source speaker diarization
  • Sentence Transformers - Open source semantic embeddings

While we support integration with commercial LLM providers for summarization, the core transcription and analysis features work entirely with open source models. You maintain full control over your data and processing.

We Want Your Feedback!​

This is just the beginning. We're excited to share OpenTranscribe with the world and eager to hear your feedback. Whether you're using it for:

  • Meeting transcriptions
  • Podcast production
  • Academic research
  • Legal documentation
  • Customer service analysis
  • Content creation

We want to know about your experience!

How to Get Involved​

  • Try it out - Install with our one-line installer
  • Report issues - Let us know if something doesn't work as expected
  • Suggest features - Tell us what features would make OpenTranscribe more useful for you
  • Contribute code - Submit pull requests to improve the platform
  • Improve documentation - Help make our docs clearer and more comprehensive
  • Share your story - Let us know how you're using OpenTranscribe

Getting Started​

# Quick install
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/davidamacey/OpenTranscribe/master/setup-opentranscribe.sh | bash

# Start the application
cd opentranscribe
./opentranscribe.sh start

# Access at http://localhost:5173

What's Next?​

As we work towards v1.0.0, we're planning to add:

  • Real-time transcription for live streaming
  • Enhanced speaker analytics and visualization
  • Better speaker diarization models
  • Google-style text search
  • LLM powered RAG Chat with transcript text
  • Other refinements along the way!

Thank You​

A huge thank you to:

  • The open source community for the amazing tools and libraries that made this possible
  • The AI/ML community for continuously pushing the boundaries of what's possible
  • Everyone who tested early versions and provided feedback
  • The developers of WhisperX, PyAnnote, FastAPI, Svelte, and all our dependencies

Resources​

We're incredibly excited about this release and can't wait to see what you build with OpenTranscribe. Here's to many more releases and a vibrant, collaborative community!

Happy transcribing! 🎙️

— The OpenTranscribe Team