Meet2Notes 0.8.0

Native Bonsai and reusable long context bring fast local follow-up questions to
long meetings. This release also adds streamed Markdown answers, Ollama discovery,
hardware-aware audio/LLM setup, Linux CUDA repair and long-recording fixes.

Watch the performance demo: three
short follow-up answers on an RTX 3070 (8 GB VRAM, 32 GB system RAM), with
1.62–1.83 s to first text after the initial 75.68 s cold request. See
measurement details
for conditions and limitations.

Changes

• Add the narrated Bonsai performance demo and measured cold-load/follow-up
  timings to the README, with a consolidated overview of changes since 0.7.0
  and documentation of the recording methodology and cache limits.

• Play transcript and speaker timestamps against the normalized WAV to avoid
  inaccurate browser seeking in long variable-bitrate MP3 recordings.

• Add automatic audio installation profiles shared by Windows, Linux, Pinokio and
  Settings: CPU INT8 bundles or NVIDIA Small/Turbo with Sherpa CPU diarization.
  Preserve existing choices; install files before applying settings, without inference.

• Add opt-in coordinated model residency, deferred unloads and a pre-output CPU
  retry for Whisper CUDA failures. Keep summary KV state across assistant questions.

• Show elapsed activity and indeterminate progress during long diarize CPU jobs;
  support cancellation while waiting for the isolated worker's response.

• Reuse native Bonsai's complete-transcript KV prefix from AI notes in subsequent
  assistant questions. Show model-loading and context-processing progress before
  the first answer token.

• Render long transcripts in cooperative batches with loading progress and cancel
  stale renders when switching versions. Defer the hidden speaker panel until its
  tab is opened and skip layout work for off-screen transcript rows.

• Apply Bonsai automatic context sizing inside the shared summary adapter, covering
  queued AI notes and speaker notes as well as chat. Check the actual tokenizer
  before generation, without changing saved context preferences.

• Fix hierarchical summary boundary overflows by budgeting the same transcript
  and evidence-group headers that are sent to the model.

• Native Bonsai chat now keeps a stable complete-document prefix and explicitly
  reuses the resident KV cache, with Q4 K/V compression and hybrid-state checkpoints.
  Prompt timing logs report reused/new tokens without logging meeting content.

• Add automatic native Bonsai context growth up to 262,144 total tokens. Preserve
  complete attachments, retain larger loaded windows, and retry GPU allocation
  failures with a host KV cache only when system RAM has sufficient headroom.
  Manual context remains available; no transcript is silently truncated.

• Automatically attach the active completed transcript when selecting a meeting
  in Meeting Assistant or Prompt. The user can remove it; switching scopes clears
  old attachments and ignores stale document requests.

• Prevent native Bonsai factual chat from suppressing names already present in the
  evidence by using neutral repetition sampling for prompt answers. Context and
  output limits remain unchanged; this fixes premature normal-stop answers.

• Show readable meeting source links for attached documents and retrieved excerpts
  in Meeting Assistant and Prompt, including streamed answers. Unknown citation
  labels are marked unverified instead of being linked to unrelated evidence.

• Fix intermittent empty Bonsai answers on follow-up questions: explicitly disable
  thinking in each native chat request instead of relying on a zero reasoning budget.
  Keep the output allowance for the visible answer and report empty native responses
  with safe diagnostics that do not log internal reasoning text.

• Automatically recommend and install Bonsai 27B 1-bit for compatible NVIDIA
  GPUs with 8+ GB VRAM, Ternary for 16+ GB, and LFM for modest/unsupported systems.
  Windows, Linux/macOS, Pinokio and CLI share the policy; updates preserve explicit
  model choices and custom storage locations. Explicit profile/skip options remain available.

• Add pinned, SHA-256-verified Bonsai GGUFs and a private Prism runtime, including
  private CUDA libraries on Windows/Linux and an optional Apple Silicon Metal runtime.
  Native answers support streaming and managed process cleanup without requiring Ollama.

• Make local LLM installation download-only, including Settings installation actions.
  No LLM is loaded and no response is generated as an installation test.
  Automatically selected profiles start with preloading disabled.

• Send Meeting Assistant conversation history as actual user/assistant turns,
  keep the current question last with its meeting evidence, and use a chat-specific
  default instead of the AI notes summarization instruction. Preserve custom prompts
  and bounded history without orphan assistant turns.

• Fix AI notes staying queued when summary generation and search indexing finish
  in the same job update. Process every completed job, retry failed UI refreshes,
  and preserve completed notes when a late generation response still says queued.

• Added configurable streaming for Meeting Assistant and direct Live Assistant
  questions, with incremental Markdown, activity indicators, cancellation, and
  buffered fallback for providers that explicitly reject streaming. Supports local
  llama.cpp models, Ollama and remote providers through LiteLLM.

• Render Markdown in Live Assistant and Meeting Assistant answers, including lists,
  tables and code, with escaped HTML, safe links and the original text for copying.

• Added an Ollama profile in AI Engine with service/executable discovery, a selector
  of verified text-generation models, editable server address, cloud model labels,
  and connection diagnostics. Discovery never loads or downloads a model.

• Send the configured context window to Ollama, preserve explicit model selection,
  and avoid forwarding shared API credentials to the dedicated Ollama profile.

• Automatically discover and activate Linux CUDA 12 / cuDNN 9 libraries for
  Faster Whisper, including libraries installed by pip or conda outside the
  system linker path. Check native library initialization in an isolated process.

• Use CPU/int8 for Auto when Linux CUDA cannot be initialized; show actionable
  diagnostics and a private-environment repair button in Transcription settings.
  Explicit CUDA requests fail early with the repair instructions.

• Install missing Linux CUDA libraries during CUDA setup and Pinokio install/update,
  without changing system drivers or requiring a system-wide CUDA toolkit.

Updating to 0.8.0

• Windows launcher: stop Meet2Notes, then run update.bat or rerun
  install-update.bat. The stable-Release updater creates a database backup,
  validates dependencies and verifies the saved managed LLM's files.
• Pinokio: stop Meet2Notes, select Update, then Start Meet2Notes.
  Update pulls the current branch, refreshes the private runtime, checks Linux
  CUDA libraries and verifies the saved managed LLM without loading it.
• macOS/Linux source installation: stop the app, pull the updated source and
  rerun ./install.sh with the backend/storage options used for your installation.
• Existing meetings, recordings, settings and downloaded models are retained.
  Updating does not silently switch existing model selections to Bonsai or Turbo.
  Choose a new LLM explicitly in Settings → AI engine, or use Install and
  use recommended profile in Settings → Transcription for the audio bundle.
• A compatible 8–15 GB NVIDIA GPU defaults to Bonsai 1-bit on a fresh install;
  16+ GB defaults to Ternary. System RAM, driver and architecture checks also apply.
  CPU/unsupported systems retain LFM. Installation downloads files without inference.
• Restart after updating the backend or repairing CUDA libraries. Keep a backup
  of important data before manual updates. See
  safe updates.