4.4 KiB
WhispAssist v0.7.3
Privacy-first, Windows-native meeting assistant — everything on-device, nothing leaves unless you say so.
A performance release: on Intel Core Ultra machines, transcription now leaves the CPU nearly idle. The Whisper encoder keeps running on the NPU; the decoder — previously the dominant CPU cost — now decodes with a KV cache and runs on the Intel iGPU. Nothing here changes the privacy posture: the one new download is the upgraded transcription model, fetched from the same source as before.
One universal installer (MSI and NSIS) covers every machine: Vulkan for all GPUs (NVIDIA/AMD/Intel), the Intel NPU (OpenVINO), a DirectML fallback, and CPU.
⚡ Faster, cooler transcription on NPU systems
KV-cache decoding
The NPU engine previously re-processed the entire token sequence for every new token it generated. It now uses the upgraded merged Whisper decoder and caches attention state between steps, so each step does a small, constant amount of work. This benefits every machine using the NPU/DirectML engine, whatever device the decoder runs on.
Decoder on the Intel iGPU
On NPU systems the decoder now runs on the Intel iGPU via the same OpenVINO runtime already installed for the NPU — no new runtime download. Division of labor while transcribing:
- Encoder → NPU (the short periodic spikes on Task Manager's NPU graph)
- Decoder → Intel iGPU
- CPU → audio plumbing only
Measured on a Core Ultra 5 135U (base.en): decoding on the iGPU ran ~4.7× faster than the same KV-cache decode on the CPU (1.29 s vs 6.10 s for a 19 s clip), with identical transcripts — and that work no longer occupies the CPU at all.
Fallbacks: no usable Intel iGPU → the decoder automatically drops back to the CPU (still
with the KV-cache speedup), and the log says so. Machines with an NVIDIA/AMD GPU can keep using
the Vulkan backend (Settings ▸ Hardware), which runs the whole model on that GPU. The startup
log names both devices: transcription engine: ONNX base.en (encoder EP: OpenVINO/NPU, decoder EP: OpenVINO/GPU).
Model update (automatic, one-time)
The engine's decoder artifact changed to the merged export (decoder_model_merged.onnx,
~208 MB, same trusted source). WhispAssist fetches it automatically in the background on first
launch after updating; until it arrives, transcription simply uses the whisper.cpp engine, as on
a fresh install. The superseded decoder file is cleaned up automatically.
✨ Small addition
Settings ▸ Calendar now has a one-click libpst (readpst) download button — the same style
as the Import dialog's ffmpeg/yt-dlp buttons — linking to the ezwinports Windows build.
.pst calendar import shells out to readpst, which isn't bundled; the button just opens the
download page in your browser.
📦 Install
Requirements: Windows 10 or 11 (x64). WhispAssist needs WebView2 (preinstalled on Windows 11;
the installer fetches it on Windows 10). Importing from a file/URL additionally needs ffmpeg
(and yt-dlp for URLs) on your PATH — the Import dialog links to both.
- Download
WhispAssist_0.7.3_x64_en-US.msi(or the NSISWhispAssist_0.7.3_x64-setup.exe). - Run it and accept the UAC prompt. If SmartScreen appears, choose More info → Run anyway.
- Launch WhispAssist from the Start menu.
On first run WA picks the best transcription backend (NPU → NVIDIA → AMD → Intel → CPU). It runs
without admin rights, does not add itself to startup unless you opt in, and keeps all data under
%LOCALAPPDATA%\WhispAssist.
Deploying to many machines? See docs/enterprise-deployment.md.
🔐 Checksums (SHA-256)
91a32a17addc31fbc00f38966d52402ca0c5e9e7a581a0431c383ca5a60532bd WhispAssist_0.7.3_x64_en-US.msi
764b758544b075b5aefe9dde37b04e4966df528912fb884ed1be5bd57905ecdb WhispAssist_0.7.3_x64-setup.exe
Verify after download:
Get-FileHash .\WhispAssist_0.7.3_x64_en-US.msi -Algorithm SHA256
Privacy, unchanged
Everything optional is off by default. With nothing configured, WhispAssist makes no content egress at all. Recording is opt-in; sync/AI credentials live only in the OS credential store; the MCP server is loopback-only and adds no egress; the deployment file never carries secrets. The reachable-host allowlist is derived from your settings and enforced in the core.