Whisper Valet

The backstage crew for MacWhisper. Hand the valet a rough recording — noisy room, one speaker mumbling into their coffee — and get back restored audio and a speaker-labeled transcript, per clip, automatically. macOS, fully local: nothing ever leaves your machine.

MacWhisper is a brilliant transcriber. Whisper Valet is everything around it: the audio restoration before the transcription, the speaker attribution after it, and the automation that means you never open an app at all.

~/AudioDrop/interview.mp3          you drop this at the valet stand
        │
        ▼   launchd daemon (survives reboots, notifies via macOS)
~/AudioDrop/Processed/interview/
  interview.mp3                    original (parked here, untouched)
  interview.cleaned.mp3            voices isolated from noise, quiet speaker lifted
  interview.cleaned_aggressive.mp3 harder denoise variant
  transcript.txt                   speaker-labeled, grouped by turn
  transcript.srt                   timestamped subtitles
  transcript.json                  word-level timestamps + per-segment confidence
  report.txt                       confidence table; low-confidence turns flagged

Works for any recording and any number of speakers — a monologue, a two-person interview, a five-person panel. Also ships an MCP server so Claude (or any MCP client) can queue files, watch progress, and read transcripts conversationally.

Watch the 19-second demo — drop, pipeline, results folder, labeled transcript.

What the valet actually does

1. Extract — ffmpeg pulls a uniform audio stream (video containers work too)

2. Isolate — Demucs separates the human voices from background noise onto a clean stem with true silence between words

3. Level — the quiet speaker is lifted to match the loud one (dynaudnorm + loudnorm), so raising them amplifies no noise

4. Transcribe — MacWhisper's bundled CLI (mw) transcribes the cleaned audio with word-level timestamps

5. Attribute — pyannote 3.1 works out who speaks when on the original audio, and the labels are merged onto the transcript

Why step 5 uses the original: voice isolation makes speech easier to hear but smears the vocal timbre that speaker-ID depends on. Transcribing the cleaned audio while diarizing the original gets the best of both — that split is the core design decision of this pipeline.

If pyannote can't run (no HuggingFace token, no network), the valet degrades gracefully to MacWhisper's built-in speaker detection and says so in report.txt. Every segment carries a confidence score; anything below 0.6 is flagged <-- verify so you know exactly which lines deserve a listen.

Requirements

• macOS on Apple Silicon (Intel works, slower)

• MacWhisper — Pro, for the CLI's JSON export + speaker features (brew install --cask macwhisper)

• ffmpeg (brew install ffmpeg) and uv

• Optional, recommended: a free HuggingFace token for pyannote diarization (setup prints the exact steps)

Install

git clone https://github.com/yashkotha/whisper-valet.git ~/whisper-valet
cd ~/whisper-valet && ./setup.sh

setup.sh builds three pinned Python environments, installs the launchd watch-folder daemon, and registers the MCP server with Claude Code if the claude CLI is present. Idempotent — re-run it after git pull.

Don't clone into ~/Documents, ~/Desktop, or ~/Downloads: macOS TCC blocks launchd agents from reading those folders (silently). setup.sh warns if you do.

Then drop any mp3 wav m4a aac flac ogg opus aiff mp4 mov m4v webm file into ~/AudioDrop (the valet stand). A ~3-minute clip takes ~5 minutes on an M-series CPU. Multiple drops queue sequentially; each file is processed exactly once (move-out semantics — no ledgers, no double-processing).

MCP server

setup.sh registers whisper-valet (user scope) with Claude Code. For other MCP clients, point them at <repo>/.venv-mcp/bin/whisper-valet-mcp (stdio).

Design note: the heavy pipeline runs in the daemon, not in MCP calls. Queue tools return instantly, so no MCP client timeout can kill a 40-minute job — transcribe_quick is the only synchronous tool, capped at 10 minutes.

Security: user-supplied paths are resolved (symlinks followed) and checked against an allow-list (VALET_ALLOWED_PATHS, colon-separated; defaults to your home directory), extensions are validated, model ids are pattern-checked, and subprocesses run argv-only — no shell interpolation.

Configuration

config.env (created by setup, gitignored):

NUM_SPEAKERS=auto                   # auto = detect per clip; N = force; MIN-MAX = bound (e.g. 2-5)
LABELS=""                           # optional names, e.g. "Interviewer,Responder"
AGGRESSIVE=1                        # also render the harder-denoised variant
NOTIFY=1                            # macOS notifications
#INBOX="$HOME/AudioDrop"            # the valet stand
#MW="/Applications/MacWhisper.app/Contents/MacOS/mw"

Any recording works out of the box: auto lets pyannote estimate the speaker count per clip. Force a count (2) only when you know it — on hard audio that measurably improves accuracy. LABELS is a hint, not a constraint: names are applied only when the detected speaker count matches the number of names, so an "Interviewer,Responder" config can never mislabel a 3-person clip — it just falls back to Speaker 1..N.

Every setting is also overridable via VALET_* environment variables.

Operating the daemon

tail -f ~/whisper-valet/logs/watcher.log                        # live log
launchctl print gui/$(id -u)/com.whispervalet.watcher | head    # daemon state
launchctl kickstart gui/$(id -u)/com.whispervalet.watcher       # force a sweep

A failed clip keeps its folder with status.txt = failed and a full pipeline.log; fix the cause and re-drop the original. The daemon fires on folder changes plus a 5-minute safety sweep, and survives reboots.

Development

uv venv .venv && uv pip install --python .venv/bin/python -e . pytest ruff
.venv/bin/pytest -q          # unit tests (no MacWhisper/torch needed — mocked)
.venv/bin/ruff check src tests

Credits

• The MCP-wrapper idea for MacWhisper's CLI was explored first by docdyhr/macwhisper-mcp-server — a clean, well-hardened transcribe wrapper. Whisper Valet borrows its security posture (path allow-lists, symlink resolution, argv-only subprocesses) and adds the audio-restoration pipeline, research-grade diarization, per-clip artifacts, and the reboot-surviving daemon.

• Heavy lifting by Demucs (Meta AI), pyannote.audio, MacWhisper (Good Snooze), and ffmpeg. Whisper Valet is an independent project, not affiliated with any of them.

License

MIT