HOW TO: Voice transcription: Transcribe audio with Whisper (runs locally, 12+ languages)

[smailpouri]

How is this supposed to work? Am I supposed to do something special to activate the transcription of the audios?

Does that also work with the video files?

macos 26.3
m1 max 64GB RAM
WhatsApp Backup Reader 1.29.3 and online link.

[rodrigogs]

I will take a look. It should just work, no config needed.

[rodrigogs]

Do you see any errors in the browser console?

[smailpouri]

I don’t see any errors, but none of the media files play or preview—instead the viewer shows something like this:

‎<attached: 111111-AUDIO-2023-11-11-11-11-11.opus>

This occurs for every attachment. Could this be related?

[rodrigogs]

This is really weird. Can you send me a backup from an irrelevant chat?

Where did you get this backup from? Android, iOS?

[smailpouri]

so this is what AI Coding told me and seems to fix the problem.

Cause: The chat parser only treated a line as media when it contained one of the known phrases in MEDIA_INDICATORS (e.g. (file attached), , or filename.ext (file attached)). The iOS <attached: ...> pattern was not in that list, so:

isMediaMessage() returned false → line handled as normal text.
matchMediaToMessages() only runs for media messages, so the ZIP file was never linked to the message.
Fix: Add '<attached:' to MEDIA_INDICATORS in src/lib/parser/chat-parser.ts. Then:

Those lines are correctly marked as media and get the right mediaType from existing logic (e.g. .opus → audio).
Message content still contains the full filename, so matchMediaToMessages() can link the message to the media file in the ZIP as before.

[rodrigogs]

Thanks for the MR. I will review it soon.