Whisperheim

Whisperheim is the audio Swiss army knife for Windows 11. Local dictation, call transcription with speaker separation, voice-message transcription. No cloud, no subscription, no internet at runtime.

Download

Grab the latest WhisperHeim-*-win-Setup.exe from the Releases page.

The Release notes always include the SHA-256 of Setup.exe so you can verify the download (certutil -hashfile WhisperHeim-*-win-Setup.exe SHA256 in any terminal).

Install

Whisperheim is currently unsigned (see why), so Windows will warn you on first run. Two paths:

1. Windows Defender SmartScreen — the dialog reads "Windows protected your PC". Click More info, then Run anyway.
2. Smart App Control — if the dialog reads "Smart App Control" instead of "Windows Defender SmartScreen", there is no override. SAC is opt-in but on by default on some fresh Windows 11 25H2 installs. You'll need to either turn SAC off system-wide (irreversible until OS reinstall) or wait for a signed build. Signing is on the roadmap post-UG registration — see docs/why-unsigned.md.

A short screen recording of the click-through lives in docs/media/install.mp4 once recorded.

First run

• A small setup window opens and downloads the ~640 MB Parakeet ASR model from Hugging Face. One-time download; cached in %APPDATA%\WhisperHeim\models. You can skip and configure later — dictation will then prompt for the download on first use.
• Whisperheim drops to the system tray. Right-click the tray icon for the menu and settings.
• The Silero VAD and Pyannote segmentation models ship bundled inside the installer; you don't have to download those.

Default hotkeys

Hotkey	What it does
Ctrl + Win	Hold to dictate into the focused text field
Ctrl + Win + R	Toggle call recording (system audio + microphone, with speaker separation)
Ctrl + Win + Alt	Trigger a template by speaking its name

All hotkeys are remappable from the General settings page.

Optional: install FFmpeg

For YouTube and audio-stream transcription (and as a fallback OGG/Opus decoder), Whisperheim needs FFmpeg on PATH. Whisperheim does not bundle FFmpeg — the user picks the build and license. The easiest path:

winget install -e --id Gyan.FFmpeg

The first time you invoke a feature that needs FFmpeg, Whisperheim shows a modal with the same command and an "Open download page" link. Drag-and-drop transcription of common WAV/MP3 files keeps working without FFmpeg.

Where is my data?

By default, everything user-generated lives under:

%APPDATA%\WhisperHeim\

• settings.json, bootstrap.json — your settings
• recordings\ — raw WAV captures
• transcripts\ — transcribed text
• models\ — the downloaded Parakeet model

You can move the data root to any folder you like (e.g. a synced OneDrive/Dropbox/Google Drive folder) from the General settings page.

Uninstall does NOT delete this data. If you want a fully clean removal, delete %APPDATA%\WhisperHeim\ and any custom data folder yourself after uninstalling. Whisperheim drops a WhisperHeim-data-location.txt on your desktop on uninstall to remind you where things live.

System requirements

• Windows 11 (24H2 or later recommended), x64
• ~2 GB RAM idle, ~3 GB during transcription
• ~700 MB free disk for the Parakeet model
• A working microphone (and a loopback-capable audio device for call transcription — any standard Windows 11 setup qualifies)

Privacy

• All transcription runs locally on your machine. No audio, transcripts, or metadata leave the device at runtime.
• No telemetry. Whisperheim does not call home — no analytics, no crash reporting, no usage pings.
• No accounts. No login, no cloud, no API keys required for the core features.
• The only outbound traffic on a fresh install is the one-time Parakeet model download from the Hugging Face CDN. Auto-updates check GitHub Releases.
• Optional integrations you opt into (Ollama for AI analysis, a synced data folder via your existing cloud client) are clearly labelled as such.

Signing and verification

Whisperheim is not yet code-signed. Microsoft Trusted Signing isn't available to individual developers in Germany at the time of writing; signing is planned post-UG (Unternehmergesellschaft) registration. Until then:

• Every Release publishes the SHA-256 of Setup.exe in the Release notes.
• The full source is in this repository — git log is your audit trail.
• See docs/why-unsigned.md for the full story on SmartScreen, Smart App Control, and what the signing roadmap looks like.

Build from source

git clone https://github.com/heimeshoff/WhisperHeim.git
cd WhisperHeim
dotnet build src/WhisperHeim/WhisperHeim.csproj
dotnet run --project src/WhisperHeim/WhisperHeim.csproj

Requires the .NET 9 SDK.

For the release pipeline (Velopack pack, GitHub Actions, SHA-256 surfacing), see docs/release.md.

Support

If Whisperheim is useful to you and you want to chip in, there's a tip jar:

Ko-fi — heimeshoff

License

TBD — the licensing decision is pending the monetization research, see the roadmap. The repository currently carries an Unlicense declaration; this may change before the first public 1.0 release.