Varys SebDanielsson

Use this command to install Varys:

winget install --id=SebDanielsson.Varys -e

Varys - local AI meeting transcription (WinUI 3 + Python sidecar, Parakeet/KB-Whisper, semantic search)

Varys — local AI meeting transcription

Varys transcribes your online meetings (Rocket.Chat, Jitsi, Teams-in-the-browser, …) in real time and keeps a searchable library of transcripts and AI notes — entirely on your own Windows PC. It captures both your microphone and the meeting audio, labels who said what, and can summarize each meeting with a local LLM. Nothing is ever sent to the cloud.

> Built for an NVIDIA GPU: speech-to-text runs on CUDA, and the summary LLM runs locally via > Ollama.

Features

Live captions with a clean Me / Them split — your mic vs. the meeting audio, transcribed separately so there's no echo doubling.
Per-language ASR for accuracy: English/auto uses NVIDIA Parakeet-TDT; Swedish uses KB-Whisper (KBLab), which is far more accurate on Swedish.
Meeting library: every meeting is saved as a transcript plus Markdown notes — browse, edit, and preview (rendered tables and all).
Local LLM summaries: one click turns a transcript into a summary, key decisions, and action items.
Semantic search: find what someone said months ago — even across languages — using local embeddings.
Private by design: GPU transcription and the LLM both run on your machine. No telemetry.

Requirements

Windows 11 23H2 (build 22631) or newer, x64.
An NVIDIA GPU with a recent driver (GeForce RTX 20-series or newer recommended) — speech-to-text runs on CUDA.
~10 GB free disk for the one-time engine, model, and LLM downloads.
Ollama for summaries and semantic search. Varys offers to set it up for you on first launch — one click installs it (via winget) and pulls the two models it needs (gemma4:e2b for summaries, embeddinggemma for search). You can also install it yourself from ollama.com/download.
The WebView2 runtime — always preinstalled on Windows 11.

No separate .NET install is needed — the app is self-contained.

Install

Download the latest release from the Releases page:

Varys-vX.Y.Z-win-x64.msi — installer. Double-click to install into Program Files, with a Start-Menu shortcut and a clean entry in Add/Remove Programs.
Varys-vX.Y.Z-win-x64.zip — portable. Unzip anywhere and run Varys.exe.

On first launch, a short welcome walks you through the one-time setup that can't be bundled: building the local transcription engine (downloads PyTorch — a few minutes), downloading at least one speech model (English / Swedish), and installing Ollama plus a language model for summaries and search. Everything is stored under your user profile.

Using Varys

Live transcription

Open the Live tab.
Pick the language — Auto/English (Parakeet) or Swedish (KB-Whisper). For best results don't mix languages within one meeting.
Click Start, then join your meeting. Your voice shows as Me, the meeting audio as Them.
Click Stop to end — the full timestamped transcript is saved automatically.
Click Summarize to generate notes (requires Ollama).

Meetings library

The Meetings tab lists every saved meeting with its transcript and notes.
Edit / preview notes and transcripts as Markdown (with rendered tables).
Rename a meeting by right-clicking it in the list, or double-clicking its title.
Open folder, Summarize, or Delete (Delete moves it to a recoverable trash folder).
Search from the box at the top — toggle Semantic (meaning-based, multilingual) or Keyword.

Where your data lives

Everything stays under your user profile:

%LOCALAPPDATA%\Varys\
  meetings\\   meta.json · transcript.{json,md,srt} · summary.md · index.json
  logs\app.log

Troubleshooting

The app writes a combined log (app + engine) to %LOCALAPPDATA%\Varys\logs\app.log — open it from the Open logs link at the bottom-right of the window.
Transcription never starts: make sure your NVIDIA driver is current; the first run also needs a few minutes to download the engine.
Summarize / Search fail: make sure Ollama is installed and running with the two models — the first-launch greeter can do this, or run ollama pull gemma4:e2b and ollama pull embeddinggemma yourself.

Privacy

Varys is fully local: audio, transcripts, embeddings, and LLM inference never leave your machine. There is no telemetry or account.

Building from source / contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md for the architecture, development setup, and release process.

Status

✅ Live capture + per-language ASR (Parakeet EN / KB-Whisper SV)
✅ WinUI app · meeting library · keyword + semantic search
✅ Local LLM summaries (Gemma via Ollama)
✅ Standalone win-x64 release with first-run engine setup
🚧 One-click MSIX installer (no first-run download)