Meeting Assistant is the user-facing application for turning recorded meetings into reviewed, distributable protocols. It uses Meeting Lab as its reusable local processing backend.

Current MVP Direction

The first product milestone is a desktop GUI that lets a user:

select an existing WAV, FLAC, or M4A recording
create and edit structured meeting metadata and relevant people, including whether they were present or only mentioned
import and export the reusable People list as versioned YAML
optionally map anonymous SPEAKER_XX labels to known participants
start the Meeting Lab processing pipeline
follow stage-based progress
review and edit the generated protocol
export the reviewed result

The MVP does not include integrated recording. OBS Studio remains a recommended reference recorder, but imported audio is not tied to OBS-specific behavior.

Processing Pipeline

Audio file
    -> FFmpeg preparation (mono, 16 kHz PCM WAV; normalization optional)
    -> whisper.cpp transcription (large-v3-turbo)
    -> optional pyannote.audio Community-1 diarization
    -> direct full-transcript protocol generation
    -> human review and export

Meeting Assistant calls Meeting Lab's reusable Python API (MvpMeetingConfig, MvpRunResult and run_mvp_meeting(...)). It does not run the Meeting Lab CLI as a subprocess. Fixed five-minute audio chunking is not a required part of this workflow.

GPU acceleration is supported where available, but CPU execution remains a compatibility path. Diarization is optional and produces anonymous speaker labels. A label identifies a participant only when the user explicitly confirms the mapping; automatic speaker-name inference is not allowed.

Product Outputs

The product direction includes:

a detailed, contextual protocol for review and continued work
a shorter version suitable for participants and distribution

The detailed direct-protocol flow is the practical MVP direction. The shorter version may be implemented after the initial GUI. Human review remains part of the workflow for all generated protocols.

Project Boundary

Meeting Lab owns reusable audio preparation, transcription, diarization, orchestration and protocol-generation logic. Meeting Assistant owns the GUI, context and participant editing, explicit speaker mapping, progress display, protocol editing and export.

Audio normalization is enabled by default and can be disabled in the processing options. This controls loudness normalization only: Meeting Lab still prepares every WAV, FLAC or M4A source as canonical audio before transcription.

The People section can export its current entries to a UTF-8 people.yaml file and replace them from a previous .yaml or .yml export. Stable person IDs, names, roles, organizations and attendance states are retained. This is a small reuse mechanism, not a server-side participant library or named meeting-template system.

Run the Streamlit MVP

The development setup expects meeting-assistant and meeting-lab to be sibling repositories. Meeting Lab currently imports its API through the src.meeting_lab package path, so its repository root must be supplied on PYTHONPATH. Meeting Assistant does not modify sys.path at runtime.

Create a virtual environment and install Meeting Assistant, including Streamlit:

python3 -m venv .venv
.venv/bin/pip install -e '.[dev]'
.venv/bin/pip install -e ../meeting-lab

Configure at least the local whisper.cpp model. All supported values are shown in .env.example; export them in the shell because the application does not load .env files implicitly:

export MKA_WHISPER_MODEL=/path/to/ggml-large-v3-turbo.bin
export MKA_WHISPER_EXECUTABLE=whisper-cli
export MKA_FFMPEG_EXECUTABLE=ffmpeg
export MKA_PROTOCOL_MODEL=qwen3.8:27B

Optional machine-specific settings include:

MKA_DATA_ROOT (default: data/meetings)
MKA_OLLAMA_ENDPOINT (default: http://127.0.0.1:11434)
MKA_WHISPER_THREADS (default: auto)
MKA_FFMPEG_EXECUTABLE (default: ffmpeg found on PATH)
MKA_DIARIZATION_MODE (auto, cpu, or gpu; default: auto)
MKA_DIARIZATION_RUNTIME (native or container; default: native)
MKA_DIARIZATION_CONTAINER_IMAGE (required for container diarization)

From the Meeting Assistant repository, start the UI with:

PYTHONPATH=src:../meeting-lab .venv/bin/streamlit run src/mka/ui/streamlit_app.py

Streamlit opens http://localhost:8501 by default. Installing the sibling Meeting Lab project supplies its runtime requirements such as PyYAML and Requests. Optional diarization dependencies are needed only when diarization is enabled.

Uploaded source files are stored under data/meetings/<meeting-id>/uploads/. Meeting Lab run artifacts are stored under data/meetings/<meeting-id>/runs/. The reviewed protocol is saved as protocol_edited.md inside its run directory; the generated protocol.md remains unchanged.

The upload remains in its original format and is passed unchanged to Meeting Lab. Meeting Lab creates the canonical mono 16 kHz signed PCM16 WAV run artifact used by transcription; Meeting Assistant does not duplicate audio conversion.

See Architecture, Project Knowledge, Roadmap and ADR 0011.