فرّغ مقابلة عربية على حاسوبك المحمول، دون أن تغادر الغرفة

ماذا يحدث لمعلوماتك

التكلفة

قبل أن تبدأ

• A laptop with at least 8 GB of RAM. 4 GB works but only with the 'Small' model and noticeably worse Arabic. Step 1 shows you how to check.
• A CPU that supports AVX2 (roughly, any laptop made after about 2013, but NOT low-end Celeron/Pentium/Atom chips). If Vibe says 'Your CPU is not supported by this version of Vibe. Please use a more modern PC.', the point-and-click route is closed on that machine and you need step 19 or a different laptop.
• At least 4 GB of free disk space for the app, one model file and your working copies.
• An internet connection for the first downloads only: about 44 MB for the app plus 1.62 GB for the Large v3 Turbo model. On a slow or metered connection, do this once and keep the model file. It can be copied to every other laptop in the office on a USB stick.
• THE FOLDER CHECK, WHICH IS A PREREQUISITE AND NOT A SUGGESTION. Before any recording goes on this machine, confirm that the folder you will work in is NOT synced to OneDrive, iCloud Drive, Google Drive, Dropbox or Nextcloud. Microsoft's own documentation confirms OneDrive Known Folder Move covers 'Windows known folders (Desktop, Documents, Pictures, Screenshots, and Camera Roll)' and that its silent policy is used 'to redirect and move known folders to OneDrive without any user interaction'. Apple's iCloud Drive has an equivalent 'Desktop & Documents Folders' setting. Either one uploads your witness audio and your finished transcript to a US company automatically, with no prompt, and the offline test in step 10 cannot detect it because the sync client simply uploads later when the network comes back. Step 2 walks you through this.
• Full-disk encryption turned on BEFORE the recording ever touches the laptop: BitLocker on Windows, FileVault on macOS. Turning it on afterwards does not retroactively protect what was already written to the disk. Vibe's own privacy policy is blunt about this: 'There is no encryption involved in the app.'
• The audio or video file itself. Phone voice memos (.m4a), WhatsApp voice notes (.opus, .ogg), .mp3, .wav and .mp4 all work, Vibe's architecture document confirms that 'macOS and Windows builds also bundle ffmpeg', so it converts them for you.
• A separate, non-sensitive test recording you are willing to throw away. Step 3 has you make one. Every piece of setup and proof in this recipe happens on that throwaway file, and your real interview does not come onto the machine until step 12.
• Headphones, for the listening pass in step 16. This step is not optional and it is the only reason the output can be trusted.
• Permission to have this recording on this laptop at all. A local transcript is only as private as the machine it sits on. If the laptop is shared, unencrypted, or likely to be searched, solve that before you start.
• No account, no email address, no credit card, no engineer.

الخطوات

1. خطوة 1 / 20كل الأنظمة

   Find out how much memory (RAM) your laptop has and how much free disk space. WINDOWS: press the Windows key, type the words About your PC, press Enter, and read the line 'Installed RAM'. Then open File Explorer, click 'This PC' in the left column, and read the free space under 'Local Disk (C:)'. macOS: click the Apple logo at the top-left of the screen, click 'About This Mac', and read the 'Memory' line; for disk space click the Apple logo, then System Settings, then General, then Storage. LINUX: open a terminal and run the command below.

   انسخ هذا كما هو

   free -h && df -h /home

   تأكد من أنها نجحت

   You have written down two numbers. The RAM number must be at least 4, and 8 or more is what this recipe assumes. The free-disk number must be at least 4 GB. If free disk is under 4 GB, stop and clear space now, a half-downloaded model file fails in a way the app reports as a generic error.

   ملاحظة

   Write both numbers down on paper. The RAM number decides which model you pick in step 8, and choosing a model too big for your RAM is the single most common reason this fails. The command shown is for Linux only; Windows and macOS use the menus described in the instruction.

2. خطوة 2 / 20كل الأنظمة

   MAKE A WORKING FOLDER THAT IS NOT SYNCED TO ANY CLOUD. Do not use the Desktop and do not use Documents. WINDOWS: open File Explorer, click 'This PC', open 'Local Disk (C:)', open 'Users', open the folder with your own name, and there create a new folder named exactly: transcribe. Your path is now C:\Users\YourName\transcribe. Then press the Windows key, type OneDrive, open it, click the gear icon, choose Settings, and find the backup section, recent clients call it 'Sync and backup' and older ones call it 'Backup'; in either case click 'Manage backup' and look at whether Desktop, Documents and Pictures are switched on. macOS: click the Apple logo, System Settings, click your own name at the top, click iCloud, click 'Drive', and look at whether 'Desktop & Documents Folders' is switched on. Then in Finder use the 'Go' menu, choose 'Home', and create a new folder there named exactly: transcribe. Your path is now ~/transcribe. LINUX: create ~/transcribe and confirm no Dropbox, Nextcloud, Insync or Google Drive client is syncing your home folder.

   انسخ هذا كما هو

   mkdir -p ~/transcribe && echo ~/transcribe

   تأكد من أنها نجحت

   WINDOWS: open your new folder in File Explorer and look at the address bar. The path must read C:\Users\YourName\transcribe and must NOT contain the word OneDrive anywhere. Switch File Explorer to Details view; the folder and everything in it must show no blue-cloud icon and no green-circle tick in the Status column. Those icons mean the file is being synced. macOS: with the folder open in Finder, press Command+Option+P to show the path bar at the bottom. It must read Macintosh HD > Users > YourName > transcribe. If it reads iCloud Drive anywhere, you are in the wrong place. If 'Desktop & Documents Folders' was switched on and you had already put a recording on the Desktop, assume that recording has already been uploaded to Apple.

   ملاحظة

   This is the most important step in the recipe. Microsoft's documentation confirms OneDrive Known Folder Move covers 'Windows known folders (Desktop, Documents, Pictures, Screenshots, and Camera Roll)', and describes its silent policy as being used 'to redirect and move known folders to OneDrive without any user interaction'. Apple's support page confirms the matching 'Desktop & Documents Folders' switch under System Settings > [your name] > iCloud > Drive. On a default-configured laptop, a witness interview saved to the Desktop is uploaded to a US company within minutes, and no test later in this recipe can detect it, a sync client just waits for the network and uploads then. Your home folder itself (C:\Users\YourName\ on Windows, ~/ on macOS) is not covered by either feature, which is why we work there. The Linux command shown also works on macOS. If you would rather not touch the OneDrive settings at all: you do not have to. Simply working inside C:\Users\YourName\transcribe is enough, because Known Folder Move only redirects the named folders.

3. خطوة 3 / 20كل الأنظمة

   MAKE A THROWAWAY TEST RECORDING. Take a printed page or a screen of Modern Standard Arabic you can read from, a news article, a page of one of your own reports, and record yourself on your phone reading it aloud for sixty seconds. Keep the page. Do not use anything sensitive: this file is going to be used to install, configure, prove and test everything, while your real interview stays off this laptop entirely until step 12.

   تأكد من أنها نجحت

   You have a sixty-second audio file on your phone, and you still have the exact text you read from, on paper or on screen. If you improvised instead of reading from a page, record it again, the whole value of this file is that you know the correct answer.

   ملاحظة

   This is the change that makes the recipe safe. In earlier versions, the real interview was transcribed online first and the privacy proof came afterwards, which meant that if you had accidentally chosen a cloud engine, the disclosure had already happened and could not be undone. Everything risky now happens on a recording you would not mind losing. It also gives you a known-answer test, which is the only way to find out how good this actually is on your voice, your accent and your microphone, in five minutes, rather than after a three-hour interview.

4. خطوة 4 / 20كل الأنظمة

   Copy the test recording from your phone into the transcribe folder you made in step 2, and rename the copy so its name has no spaces and no Arabic letters: name it exactly test-01.m4a (or test-01.mp3, or whatever extension it already has, change only the part before the dot).

   تأكد من أنها نجحت

   The file is inside C:\Users\YourName\transcribe (Windows) or ~/transcribe (macOS and Linux), it is named test-01 followed by its extension, and double-clicking it plays your own voice. If the file is 0 KB, the copy from the phone failed, copy it again.

   ملاحظة

   Arabic characters and spaces in filenames are the most common cause of 'file not found' and silently empty output in every tool in this recipe, and none of them tells you that is the problem. Always rename the copy and never the original.

5. خطوة 5 / 20كل الأنظمة

   DOWNLOAD VIBE. Open your browser and go to the releases page below. Under 'Assets', download exactly one file, the one whose name ENDS with the suffix for your machine, whatever the version number in the middle happens to be. WINDOWS: the file ending _x64-setup.exe. MAC WITH APPLE SILICON (M1, M2, M3, M4): the file ending _aarch64.dmg. MAC WITH AN INTEL PROCESSOR: the file ending _x64.dmg. LINUX, DEBIAN OR UBUNTU: the file ending _amd64.deb. LINUX, FEDORA OR RHEL: the file ending -1.x86_64.rpm. Ignore every file ending in .sig, every file ending in .app.tar.gz, and the file named latest.json.

   انسخ هذا كما هو

   https://github.com/thewh1teagle/vibe/releases/latest

   تأكد من أنها نجحت

   The file you downloaded is tens of megabytes, not a few kilobytes. If it is a few hundred bytes you took the .sig signature file by mistake, delete it and download the one without .sig at the end. For scale, in release v3.1.6, which was the current release when we checked on 30 August 2026, the assets were: Windows installer 43,592,944 bytes; Apple-silicon .dmg 38,364,114; Intel .dmg 44,111,146; .deb 36,727,394; .rpm 36,721,050. Newer releases will differ a little. TAKE WHATEVER VERSION THE PAGE SHOWS, unlike Buzz, Vibe builds every platform including Intel Macs from the same release, so 'take the newest version' is safe advice here.

   ملاحظة

   Vibe is MIT-licensed, free, has no paid tier, no account and no trial. Its README describes it as 'Ultimate privacy: fully offline transcription, no data ever leaves your device'; its architecture document confirms the engine is 'Rust + whisper.cpp bindings' and that 'macOS and Windows builds also bundle ffmpeg', so it will accept your phone recording directly. IF YOU PREFER A DIFFERENT APP: Buzz (MIT, also free, github.com/chidiwilliams/buzz) does the same job, but its Windows download is one small .exe plus two large .bin files totalling about 2.7 GB, and on Intel Macs you must take exactly the 1.4.5 mac-X64 build and never a higher version, because 1.4.5 is the last release that supports Intel at all. Subtitle Edit (github.com/SubtitleEdit/subtitleedit) is a good free Windows alternative if you already work with subtitles. We have removed MacWhisper from this recipe, see honestLimitations for why.

6. خطوة 6 / 20كل الأنظمة

   INSTALL AND OPEN IT. WINDOWS: double-click the _x64-setup.exe file you downloaded and follow the installer. If a blue box appears saying 'Windows protected your PC', click the small words 'More info' and then the button 'Run anyway'. macOS: double-click the .dmg and drag the Vibe icon onto the Applications folder shown beside it. If macOS then refuses to open it and says the developer cannot be verified, click the Apple logo, System Settings, Privacy & Security, scroll down to the message about Vibe, and click 'Open Anyway'. LINUX (Debian/Ubuntu): open a terminal, change into the folder where the .deb downloaded, and run the command below.

   انسخ هذا كما هو

   sudo apt install ./vibe_*_amd64.deb

   تأكد من أنها نجحت

   Vibe opens and shows a window containing the words 'Drop audio, video or a folder here'. If instead you see 'Your CPU is not supported by this version of Vibe. Please use a more modern PC.', this machine lacks AVX2 and the point-and-click route is closed on it, go to step 19, or use a different laptop.

   ملاحظة

   The security warning is normal for small independent open-source software that has not paid for a commercial code-signing certificate. It is not a virus warning. You should only click through it because you downloaded from the official releases page in step 5. Never do this for software that arrived by email, WhatsApp, or a link someone sent you. The apt command uses a wildcard so it works whatever version you downloaded; it assumes you are in the folder where the .deb landed. On Fedora use: sudo dnf install ./vibe-*.x86_64.rpm

7. خطوة 7 / 20كل الأنظمة

   TURN OFF THE THINGS THAT PHONE HOME, AND DECIDE WHAT THE APP IS ALLOWED TO KEEP. Open Vibe's Settings (the gear icon). Find the toggle labelled 'Anonymous analytics' and switch it OFF. Ignore the message beside it that says 'We strongly recommend keeping this enabled so we can find and fix issues faster.' Still in Settings, find 'Save projects', whose description reads 'Automatically save transcripts and media in the projects folder.' Switch that OFF. Also in Settings, find the lines 'Projects folder', 'Models Folder' and 'Temporary files', and write those three paths down on paper. You need them in steps 8, 9 and 18. Finally: never touch the 'Summarize' option in the 'More Options' menu.

   تأكد من أنها نجحت

   The 'Anonymous analytics' switch is visibly off, and the 'Save projects' switch is visibly off. Both must read off before you go any further, and you must have the three folder paths written down. If you cannot find these settings, update Vibe to the current release.

   ملاحظة

   Vibe's privacy policy states that by default it 'collects anonymous, privacy-friendly analytics through Aptabase', specifically 'Event names (e.g. transcription started, failed)', 'Error messages (no file names or content)' and 'OS name, app version, and country (coarse, no IP stored)', and that 'Analytics can be disabled at any time in Settings.' That is not your audio and not your transcript, but it is a signal leaving the machine, and for an organisation that considers even the fact of using transcription software sensitive it matters. 'Save projects' matters for a different reason: Vibe's own interface text says 'Vibe stores each transcript and its media together in this folder' and describes 'Saved projects' as 'Every transcription Vibe saved, with its copy of the audio.' With it on, deleting your own copy of the interview leaves Vibe holding a full duplicate, audio and text, in a folder you did not choose. 'Summarize' is worse: Vibe's own description says 'Requires API key. Once the transcription is complete, it will be sent to Claude API along with the chosen prompt'. It is off by default and does nothing without a key, and you must never turn it on for a sensitive interview.

8. خطوة 8 / 20كل الأنظمة

   GET A MODEL, THEN SET THE TWO SETTINGS THAT MATTER. Drag test-01.m4a onto the Vibe window (or click 'Select File' and choose it). Then, before pressing anything: (1) GET A MODEL. Vibe does not ship with a menu of named models. It has a models folder and a link box. In Settings look for 'Download model' and 'Paste Model Link', paste the direct link for the model you want, and wait for the download to finish; then use 'Select Model' to pick it. IF YOUR LAPTOP HAS 8 GB OF RAM OR MORE, use Large v3 Turbo, the link is in the command field below. IF YOUR LAPTOP HAS ONLY 4 GB, use Small instead: https://huggingface.co/ggerganov/whisper.cpp/resolve/main/ggml-small.bin?download=true, Do not use Tiny or Base. (2) Find 'Select Language' and choose Arabic explicitly, do not leave it on auto-detect. (3) Find 'Translate To English' and make sure it is switched OFF.

   انسخ هذا كما هو

   https://huggingface.co/ggerganov/whisper.cpp/resolve/main/ggml-large-v3-turbo.bin

   تأكد من أنها نجحت

   Before you press Transcribe, read the screen back to yourself and confirm all three: a model is selected and its name contains large-v3-turbo (or small on a 4 GB machine), the language shows Arabic, and 'Translate To English' is off. If Vibe says 'No models installed' or 'Select a model in Settings to get started', the model download did not finish, do that first. If any one of these three is wrong you will get a page of confident, fluent, useless text and it will not look like an error.

   ملاحظة

   Vibe's own model page (https://github.com/thewh1teagle/vibe/blob/main/docs/models.md) is where those links come from; it labels the turbo model '(Recommended)' and also offers one-click 'Magic Setup' links that open a model directly in Vibe. Vibe's Settings text explains the manual alternative: 'Download any supported model in ggml or gguf format (with the file extension ending in .bin). Transfer it to the models directory, then select from the dropdown. No need to restart', so you can equally drop a .bin file into the 'Models Folder' path you wrote down in step 7. FILE SIZES, read from Hugging Face on 30 August 2026: tiny 77.7 MB, base 148 MB, small 488 MB, medium 1.53 GB, large-v3 3.1 GB, large-v3-turbo 1.62 GB, large-v3-turbo-q5_0 574 MB. MEMORY, from whisper.cpp's own table: tiny ~273 MB, base ~388 MB, small ~852 MB, medium ~2.1 GB, large ~3.9 GB. That table has no row for turbo, so we cannot quote you a figure for it; in practice assume it needs at least as much as medium. Tiny and Base produce gibberish in Arabic, do not use them. Small is the realistic minimum, and expect heavy correction. Auto-detect on Arabic dialect audio regularly guesses Persian, Urdu or Turkish and then returns fluent nonsense; setting the language by hand is free accuracy. 'Translate To English' does exactly what Vibe's own help text says, 'Translate transcription into English from any language by enabling this option', so if your transcript comes back in English, this is why. If Vibe crashes or your GPU driver misbehaves, switch on 'Transcribe on the CPU', described in the app as 'Runs transcription without the GPU. Slower, but it avoids driver crashes and frees the GPU for other work.'

9. خطوة 9 / 20كل الأنظمة

   PRESS TRANSCRIBE ON THE THROWAWAY FILE. If the model is still downloading, wait for it to finish. That is the 1.62 GB download for Large v3 Turbo, and it needs internet. Then let the transcription run. Do not close the lid or let the laptop sleep while it works.

   تأكد من أنها نجحت

   Arabic script appears on screen and it recognisably resembles the page you read from. THREE WAYS THIS FAILS QUIETLY, all of which look like success: (a) the transcript is empty or a single blank line, almost always the filename, go back to step 4; (b) the text is in Latin letters, or in Persian or Turkish script, the language was not set, go back to step 8; (c) the text is in English, 'Translate To English' was left on, go back to step 8. Do not continue until you have Arabic script in front of you.

   ملاحظة

   If the model download stalls or crawls on a throttled connection, you can fetch the file by hand instead: go to https://huggingface.co/ggerganov/whisper.cpp/tree/main in a browser that can resume downloads, take ggml-large-v3-turbo.bin (1.62 GB), and put it in the 'Models Folder' path you wrote down in step 7. Or have a colleague abroad download it and bring it on a USB stick, the app will use a model file you place there without ever reaching the internet. The model file is a permanent office asset: copy it once and every other laptop can be set up fully offline from it. If you are very short of disk space, ggml-large-v3-turbo-q5_0.bin is 574 MB instead of 1.62 GB at a small accuracy cost.

10. خطوة 10 / 20كل الأنظمة

    NOW PROVE NOTHING IS LEAVING THE ROOM, STILL ON THE THROWAWAY FILE, BEFORE YOUR INTERVIEW IS ANYWHERE NEAR THIS MACHINE. Disconnect completely. WINDOWS: press the Windows key, type Airplane mode, press Enter, and switch it on. macOS: click the Wi-Fi icon in the menu bar and turn Wi-Fi off. LINUX: turn off networking from the system tray. Unplug any network cable on every platform. Then transcribe test-01.m4a a second time, with the network down.

    تأكد من أنها نجحت

    The second transcription runs to completion and produces Arabic text with the network off. That proves the engine is doing the work on your own processor. If it fails, hangs, or reports a network error, you have selected a cloud engine somewhere, go back to step 8, fix it, and repeat this test. Because you did this on a throwaway recording, a failure here costs you nothing.

    ملاحظة

    Be precise about what this test does and does not prove. It proves the engine can run entirely locally. It does not prove that the earlier online run in step 9 transmitted nothing, and it cannot detect folder sync at all, a OneDrive or iCloud client simply waits and uploads when the network returns, which is why step 2 exists and is separate. Run this once per machine, then write the result into your organisation's AI policy: 'transcription verified to run with networking disabled on [machine], [date]'.

11. خطوة 11 / 20كل الأنظمة

    SCORE THE KNOWN-ANSWER TEST. Put the page you read from in step 3 beside the transcript on screen. Count the first hundred words of the transcript and count how many of them are wrong, wrong word, missing word, or invented word. Write that number down. It is your honest error rate on clear read-aloud Modern Standard Arabic on this machine, with this microphone, in this voice.

    تأكد من أنها نجحت

    You have a number out of 100. Interpretation: this is the BEST this setup will ever do for you, because read-aloud MSA from a page is the easiest possible input. Real interview audio will be worse, and dialect will be very much worse. If the number is above about 45 out of 100 on clear read-aloud MSA, something is misconfigured rather than merely difficult, check that the model really is Large v3 Turbo and not Small or Tiny, and that the language is set to Arabic.

    ملاحظة

    We give 45 as a tripwire rather than a promise, because the only published anchor we can verify is 45.93% word error rate for the much smaller whisper-small model on MSA before fine-tuning (Ozyilmaz, Coler and Valdenegro-Toro, Interspeech 2025). We could find no published figure for large-v3-turbo on MSA, so we are not going to invent one. Large v3 Turbo should be clearly better than that anchor on clean read-aloud speech; if it is not, your settings are wrong. Whatever number you measure here IS your number, trust it over anything anyone tells you, including us.

12. خطوة 12 / 20كل الأنظمة

    ONLY NOW BRING THE REAL INTERVIEW ONTO THE LAPTOP. Copy the recording into the same transcribe folder from step 2, C:\Users\YourName\transcribe on Windows, ~/transcribe on macOS and Linux. Rename the copy to exactly interview-01 plus its existing extension, for example interview-01.m4a. Leave your master recording untouched wherever it already lives; you will need it for the listening pass and you must never be editing your only copy.

    تأكد من أنها نجحت

    Double-click interview-01.m4a and confirm it plays and is the right recording and the right length. Confirm again that the folder path contains no cloud service name and shows no sync icons, repeat the step 2 check now that a sensitive file is in it, because a sync client that was switched on since then would begin uploading immediately.

    ملاحظة

    Everything before this point happened on a file you did not care about. That was deliberate. From here on, treat this folder the way you would treat a paper file of the same interview.

13. خطوة 13 / 20كل الأنظمة

    OPTIONAL BUT WORTH IT: CUT THE LONG SILENCES BEFORE YOU TRANSCRIBE. Install the free open-source editor Audacity from the address below. Open your working copy interview-01.m4a in it, find any stretch longer than about fifteen seconds where nobody is speaking, select it, and delete it, or simply split the recording into the sections where someone is talking. Save the result as a new file, interview-01-trimmed.wav, in the same folder. Never edit your master copy, only this working copy.

    انسخ هذا كما هو

    https://www.audacityteam.org/download/

    تأكد من أنها نجحت

    The trimmed file plays, is shorter than the original, and still contains everything anyone actually said, play the joins to be sure you have not cut off the start or end of a sentence. Write down, on paper, which stretches you removed and where, so that your timestamps and your chain of custody stay honest.

    ملاحظة

    Silence is where Whisper invents sentences. Removing it removes most of the opportunity, and this is the only way to do that without a terminal. Skip this step if your recording has little dead air, or if you are short of time, steps 16 and 17 will still catch the problem, this step just makes there be less of it to catch. Audacity is free, GPL-licensed, and available for Windows, macOS and Linux; check the download page for which builds it currently ships. Two warnings: Audacity keeps unsaved-project temporary files in a directory of its own, which you will clean up in step 18; and if you do trim, use interview-01-trimmed.wav as the file you feed to Vibe in the next step instead of interview-01.m4a.

14. خطوة 14 / 20كل الأنظمة

    TRANSCRIBE THE REAL INTERVIEW, WITH THE NETWORK OFF FROM THE START. Turn Airplane mode on (Windows) or Wi-Fi off (macOS) before you load the file. Then drag interview-01.m4a, or interview-01-trimmed.wav if you did step 13, onto the Vibe window, confirm the three settings from step 8 are still model = large-v3-turbo, language = Arabic, Translate To English = off, and press Transcribe.

    تأكد من أنها نجحت

    The transcript is in Arabic script, and its length is roughly proportional to the length of the recording, a one-hour interview should not produce three lines. If the output is a single short paragraph for an hour of audio, or the same sentence repeated down the page, stop: that is the failure described in step 17 and in the failure modes, not a finished transcript.

    ملاحظة

    There is no reason to be online for this, so do not be. TIME, HONESTLY: we have no benchmark for this model on this class of laptop that we can stand behind, so we are not giving you a figure dressed up as one. Plan for somewhere between one and five times the length of the recording, a one-hour interview may take one to five hours on a CPU-only machine. Start it and go to lunch. Do not start a three-hour recording at 5pm expecting it before you go home. TIME A TEN-MINUTE FILE FIRST and multiply: that measurement on your own laptop is worth more than any published table. Split anything over an hour into 20–30 minute pieces so you get partial results you can stop between.

15. خطوة 15 / 20كل الأنظمة

    EXPORT THE RESULT TWICE: once as a subtitle file and once as plain text. In Vibe click 'Save Transcript', choose Format, and pick 'SRT'. Save it into your transcribe folder. Then do it again and pick the plain-text format. Save both into C:\Users\YourName\transcribe (Windows) or ~/transcribe (macOS and Linux), not the Desktop, not Documents.

    تأكد من أنها نجحت

    OPEN THE .SRT FILE IN NOTEPAD (Windows) OR TEXTEDIT (macOS) AND LOOK AT IT. Good output looks like this: a line containing just the number 1, then a line reading something like 00:00:04,120 --> 00:00:09,880, then a line of Arabic text, then a blank line, then 2, and so on. If the file is 0 bytes, if it contains numbers and timestamps but no Arabic at all, or if it is one enormous block with no timestamps, the export failed and you must redo it, do not carry on and discover this in step 17.

    ملاحظة

    The .srt is the important one and most people skip it. It carries a timestamp against every line, so during the listening pass you can jump straight to the second of audio a sentence claims to come from. Without timestamps you cannot check a transcript efficiently, and a transcript you cannot check is not evidence. Vibe offers several other export formats as well; you do not need them for this.

16. خطوة 16 / 20كل الأنظمة

    DO THE LISTENING PASS. Open the .srt beside the original master recording, put your headphones on, and listen to the whole recording while reading along. Correct as you go. Mark clearly, in your own file, every passage you have verified by ear and every passage you have not.

    تأكد من أنها نجحت

    Every passage in the document is now marked either verified-by-ear or not-verified. There is no partial credit here: an unmarked document is an unverified document, and whoever reads it next will assume it is a record.

    ملاحظة

    This is the step that turns a machine draft into a record, and there is no shortcut around it. The machine saves you the typing, not the listening. For a documenter the rule is absolute: no sentence goes into a case file, a submission, a report or a published quotation unless a human has heard it. If time is short, do a full listening pass on the passages you intend to quote or rely on, and stamp the rest of the document 'machine draft, unverified' so that nobody downstream mistakes it for a record. Budget the full length of the recording for this step, on top of the transcription time.

17. خطوة 17 / 20كل الأنظمة

    DO THE HALLUCINATION SWEEP, IN ADDITION TO LISTENING. Search your transcript for any sentence that appears three or more times in a row. Then open the .srt and look for any single subtitle line whose two timestamps are more than about ten seconds apart, and play that exact stretch of the audio.

    تأكد من أنها نجحت

    You have played the audio behind every repeated block and every over-long subtitle line, and either confirmed the words or deleted them. If you found none of either, say so explicitly in your notes, 'swept for repeated lines and over-long segments, none found', so the next person knows the check was done rather than skipped.

    ملاحظة

    Whisper does not only mis-hear words: it invents whole sentences that nobody said, most often over silence, background noise and long pauses. Koenecke, Choi, Mei, Schellmann and Sloane ('Careless Whisper: Speech-to-Text Hallucination Harms', ACM FAccT 2024, arXiv:2402.08021) ran 13,140 audio segments and confirmed that 187 of them reliably produced hallucinations, about 1.4%, and found that '38% of hallucinations include' explicit harms: invented violence, invented racial references, invented medications, and statements phrased with false authority. They found hallucination concentrated among speakers 'who speak with longer shares of non-vocal durations', which is exactly what an interview with a traumatised or hesitant witness sounds like. Long silences and repeated lines are therefore the two highest-yield places to look.

18. خطوة 18 / 20كل الأنظمة

    CLEAN UP THE COPIES YOU DID NOT KNOW YOU HAD MADE. In Vibe's Settings, open 'Saved projects', Vibe's own description is 'Every transcription Vibe saved, with its copy of the audio', and if anything is listed there, click 'Delete all projects' and confirm. Then open the 'Temporary files' folder whose path you wrote down in step 7 and empty it. If you used Audacity in step 13, open Audacity, go to Preferences and then Directories, find the temporary-files path, close Audacity, and empty that folder too. Finally delete your working copy interview-01.m4a, any interview-01-trimmed.wav, and any exports you do not need to keep.

    تأكد من أنها نجحت

    Search the whole disk for the filename and confirm only the copies you meant to keep come back. WINDOWS: open File Explorer, click 'This PC', type interview-01 in the search box at the top right, and wait for the search to finish. macOS: press Command+Space, or in Finder press Command+F, click 'This Mac', and search for interview-01. If Vibe's projects folder, Vibe's temp folder or Audacity's temp folder appear in those results, they were not emptied, go back and empty them.

    ملاحظة

    Turning off 'Save projects' in step 7 prevents most of this; this step removes what was created before you did, and whatever Audacity left behind. Vibe's own confirmation dialogue for 'Delete all projects' reads 'Their transcripts and copies of the audio will be removed. This cannot be undone.' BE HONEST WITH YOURSELF ABOUT WHAT DELETING ACHIEVES: sending a file to the recycle bin, or even emptying the bin, does not erase it from the disk, and a forensic tool can often recover it. The only thing that genuinely protects a seized laptop is full-disk encryption that was already switched on before the file was ever written, BitLocker on Windows, FileVault on macOS, and even that protects only a powered-off machine, not one that is running and unlocked. Deleting afterwards is good hygiene. It is not a security control.

19. خطوة 19 / 20ماك

    OPTIONAL, TERMINAL ROUTE, macOS AND LINUX ONLY, SKIP THIS UNLESS YOU HAVE A TECHNICAL VOLUNTEER. This is not available on Windows in this recipe; Windows readers should stop at step 18. whisper.cpp is the fastest and lightest way to run Whisper on a CPU-only laptop, it will run on CPUs without AVX2 that Vibe refuses, and it has a built-in silence filter. Open the Terminal application and type these lines one at a time, pressing Enter after each and waiting for it to finish before typing the next. Lines starting with # are comments, do not type them.

    انسخ هذا كما هو

    # macOS only: install the build tools first (skip the first line if you already have Homebrew)
    /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"
    brew install cmake ffmpeg git
    
    # Linux (Debian/Ubuntu) instead of the two lines above:
    # sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y git cmake build-essential ffmpeg
    
    # From here the commands are the same on macOS and Linux:
    git clone https://github.com/ggml-org/whisper.cpp.git
    cd whisper.cpp
    cmake -B build
    cmake --build build -j --config Release
    sh ./models/download-ggml-model.sh large-v3-turbo
    sh ./models/download-vad-model.sh silero-v6.2.0
    ffmpeg -i ~/transcribe/interview-01.m4a -ar 16000 -ac 1 -c:a pcm_s16le ~/transcribe/interview-01.wav
    ./build/bin/whisper-cli -m models/ggml-large-v3-turbo.bin --vad --vad-model models/ggml-silero-v6.2.0.bin -f ~/transcribe/interview-01.wav -l ar -otxt -osrt

    تأكد من أنها نجحت

    Check in three places, because each one can fail while printing something that looks like progress. (1) After the ffmpeg line, run: ls -l ~/transcribe/interview-01.wav, the size must be roughly 1.9 MB per minute of audio and must not be 0. A 44-byte .wav is an empty file with only a header, and whisper-cli will happily transcribe it into nothing. (2) After the build, run: ls -l ./build/bin/whisper-cli, the file must exist. (3) After the last line, run: wc -c ~/transcribe/interview-01.wav.txt && head -20 ~/transcribe/interview-01.wav.srt, the byte count must not be 0, and the head must show numbered blocks with timestamps and Arabic text. Note the output filenames: whisper-cli appends to the input name, so you get interview-01.wav.txt and interview-01.wav.srt, not interview-01.txt.

    ملاحظة

    The -l ar flag sets Arabic explicitly; do not omit it. The ffmpeg line is required because, in the whisper.cpp README's own words, 'the whisper-cli example currently runs only with 16-bit WAV files, so make sure to convert your input before running the tool'. That command is the README's own conversion line with your paths substituted. ffmpeg is not present on a clean macOS or Linux machine, which is why the install line is here rather than assumed. The two --vad lines matter: Silero VAD detects and skips non-speech, which is precisely where Whisper invents sentences, so this is the terminal equivalent of the Audacity trimming in step 13. The download script writes the VAD file as models/ggml-silero-v6.2.0.bin, which is exactly the path passed to --vad-model. If you are very short of disk space, download ggml-large-v3-turbo-q5_0.bin (574 MB against 1.62 GB) instead, at a small accuracy cost, and change the -m path to match. Everything here runs offline after the model downloads. This route does NOT replace steps 16 and 17.

20. خطوة 20 / 20كل الأنظمة

    OPTIONAL, TERMINAL ROUTE, SILENCE FILTERING WITH A SCRIPT, again, skip unless you have a technical volunteer. faster-whisper is the other main local engine and it has a built-in voice-activity filter that skips silence automatically. It works on Windows too, but only if Python is already installed from python.org, which is a longer detour than the Vibe route is worth for most readers. Install it, then save the Python code below as transcribe.py and run it with: python3 transcribe.py

    انسخ هذا كما هو

    python3 -m pip install faster-whisper
    
    # --- save everything below as transcribe.py, then run: python3 transcribe.py ---
    # Replace YOURNAME with your own username in both paths before running.
    from faster_whisper import WhisperModel
    
    AUDIO = "/Users/YOURNAME/transcribe/interview-01.m4a"
    OUT   = "/Users/YOURNAME/transcribe/interview-01-fw.txt"
    
    model = WhisperModel("large-v3-turbo", device="cpu", compute_type="int8")
    segments, info = model.transcribe(AUDIO, language="ar", vad_filter=True, beam_size=5)
    
    with open(OUT, "w", encoding="utf-8") as f:
        for s in segments:
            line = "[%.2fs -> %.2fs] %s" % (s.start, s.end, s.text)
            print(line)
            f.write(line + "\n")
    
    print("Wrote:", OUT)

    تأكد من أنها نجحت

    You must see Arabic lines scrolling past on screen while it runs, and the last line must read 'Wrote: /Users/YOURNAME/transcribe/interview-01-fw.txt'. Then check the file is not empty: wc -c /Users/YOURNAME/transcribe/interview-01-fw.txt, if that reports 0, the transcription produced nothing and the script still exited cleanly, which is exactly the silent-empty-success failure to watch for. Open the file and confirm it contains Arabic script and timestamps in the form [12.40s -> 18.90s].

    ملاحظة

    vad_filter=True is the setting that matters: it detects and skips non-speech, which is where Whisper invents sentences. compute_type="int8" is what makes this fit on a CPU-only 8 GB laptop. It uses substantially less memory than the default; the project publishes its own CPU benchmark table in its README at https://github.com/SYSTRAN/faster-whisper if you want figures, and we would rather you read them there than trust a number copied into this page. The model name "large-v3-turbo" is a valid key in faster-whisper's own model map, so the string above works as written. faster-whisper was version 1.2.1, MIT-licensed, and required Python 3.9 or newer when we checked on 30 August 2026, confirm the current state at https://pypi.org/project/faster-whisper/. On first run it downloads the model from Hugging Face, so that run needs internet; after that it is offline. Note that vad_filter reduces hallucination, it does not eliminate it, and it does not replace the listening pass in step 16.