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Palash Debnath 3cae853440 feat(catalogue): one page, one axis — setup summary over per-family engines and weights

The Model Catalogue put the same decision on two axes: an Engines pane with
TTS/ASR/LLM tabs and a Models pane with TTS/ASR/Dictation/Diarisation
sections, dictation shown in both, plus storage stats, the HF token and the
voice-preview toggle parked on the model list. Settings → Voice still carried
Engines and Models entries that only pointed back here.

Now the page reads top-down: a SetupSummary (speech, transcription,
dictation, language model — engine, device, one status word, Change), the
engine list for one family, and that family's downloadable weights under it
(TTS under TTS; offline ASR, streaming dictation and diarisation under ASR;
nothing for LLM, whose engines bring their own). One storage line points at
Settings → Storage.

- ModelStoreTab takes a `family` and scopes sections and the recommendation
  preset to it (scopeReco); stats strip, HF-token toolbar and previews
  panel removed from it.
- Settings: Engines/Models categories and CataloguePointer removed; models
  directory → Storage, HF mirror → Network (both restart-flagged), voice
  previews → Storage. "Manage models" in disk usage opens the catalogue.
- Store: openCatalogue takes a family (pane key tolerated, ignored);
  pendingCatalogueTab gone.
- Engine matrix title is now the locale's plain "Engines".
- i18n: catalogue.* summary keys in all 21 locales; pane/pointer keys dropped.
- Docs: "Model Catalogue → Engines" is "Model Catalogue"; "→ Models" is
  "→ Downloaded weights".

2026-09-10 06:46:09 -07:00

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VoiceStudio — Faster-Whisper (Crash-Isolated) Engine

The same CTranslate2 Whisper engine as faster-whisper, run in a separate child process ("sidecar"). CTranslate2's GPU teardown can segfault — the endemic faster-whisper crash — and a hung or crashed transcribe in-process takes the whole backend down with it. Isolated, the child can crash or be force-killed to reclaim a hung transcribe and its VRAM while the backend stays up (#730).

There is nothing extra to install: the sidecar reuses the app's own venv — only the process boundary is new.

Selecting it

Model Catalogue, ASR tab → Use on the crash-isolated row, or
pin it with OMNIVOICE_ASR_BACKEND=faster-whisper-isolated.

It is never picked by auto-detect — it's an explicit opt-in escape hatch.

Best at

Long batch runs where one bad file must not kill the backend.
Machines where in-process faster-whisper has crashed or hung before: a sidecar crash fails only that job, and the next transcribe respawns a fresh sidecar automatically.

Platform support

Same as faster-whisper: CUDA float16 or CPU int8 on macOS, Windows, and Linux. The sidecar picks cuda/cpu itself and walks the same float16 → int8_float16 → int8 degrade chain on GPUs without efficient fp16 (#551).

Model selection

ASR_MODEL_FASTER — the shared model selection, same as the in-process engine: set it once and both variants load the same weights.
ASR_MODEL_FW — optional sidecar-only override; when set it wins over ASR_MODEL_FASTER for this engine. Default large-v3.
ASR_COMPUTE_TYPE — optional: pin the sidecar to one CTranslate2 compute type instead of the automatic degrade chain.

Weights download on first load — see downloading-models.

Trade-offs and quirks

Slightly slower per call than in-process faster-whisper (IPC overhead); the model stays warm inside the sidecar between calls, so the cost is per request, not per chunk of audio.
Word timestamps are Whisper-native (±100–300 ms) — no forced alignment. For dubbing lip-sync, use whisperx or mlx-whisper.
If the sidecar dies mid-transcription the job fails with a clear "sidecar crashed" error and the backend stays up — retry to respawn.
cuDNN 8 is still required on CUDA — same CTranslate2 requirement as the in-process engine. It's checked up front so a missing cuDNN 8 shows as "unavailable" in Model Catalogue instead of a sidecar that silently fails every transcribe (#1371).

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