transcribe-audio

transcribe-audio is a skill for Claude Code from montezuma-p/harken. It costs 63 tokens per session (731 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A local audio transcription tool based on Whisper technology, which converts speech in recordings into text. It supports voice notes, meeting recordings, common audio and video files, and WhatsApp chat exports.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to create text files and a manifest for audio batches, or produce a WhatsApp chat export with voice-note transcripts inserted into the conversation.
Why use it?
It transcribes files on the computer, so audio does not need to be sent to a cloud transcription service.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: installed under .claude/.

Part of the harken plugin — 1 skill shipped together

Good fit Use it to create text files and a manifest for audio batches, or produce a WhatsApp chat export with voice-note transcripts inserted into the conversation.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/montezuma-p/harken/transcribe-audio
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add montezuma-p/harken --skill transcribe-audio
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/montezuma-p/harken

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install harken, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 1 skill.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for transcribe-audio

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/montezuma-p/harken/transcribe-audio/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/montezuma-p/harken/transcribe-audio)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/montezuma-p/harken/transcribe-audio"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/montezuma-p/harken/transcribe-audio/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for transcribe-audio

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/montezuma-p/harken/transcribe-audio"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/montezuma-p/harken/transcribe-audio.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 63 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 731 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 1 finding. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector warn 7 Sept 2026
SkillSpector: 2 findings, up to high

These are SkillSpector’s own severities. On a checked sample its high-severity flags on skills were ~96% false positives — a documented command, a public API, a “never do X” rule — so we show them as a caution to read, not a verdict. Why →

  • high Tool Misuse · line 18
    Tool calls are chained to bypass individual safety checks or escalate capabilities beyond what any single tool call would allow.
    Fix: Limit tool chaining depth and validate the output of each tool before passing it to the next. Require explicit user approval for multi-step chains.
  • low Supply Chain · line 17
    Remote code is downloaded and executed. This bypasses code review and could introduce malicious code.
    Fix: Avoid downloading and executing remote scripts. Use trusted packages from PyPI/npm. If remote fetch is required, verify checksums and use HTTPS.
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00063 $0.00731
Opus 5 $0.00032 $0.00365
Sonnet 5 $0.00013 $0.00146
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00073

Measured 11d ago against content hash d846c1624463, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

transcribe-audio scanned grade A with 1 finding against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 11d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Makes network callslowCapability

Not a fault in itself. Listed so you know the mod talks to something, and to what.

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -LsSf \
.claude/skills/transcribe-audio/SKILL.md · 54 lines

What it actually says

Transcribe Audio (harken, local-only)

Transcribe audio with harken, a local whisper.cpp CLI (single static binary). Audio never leaves the machine — do not send audio to cloud transcription APIs, and do not write inline whisper one-liners (they reload the model per file; harken loads it once per batch).

Invocation: use harken ... if the command is on PATH. If it is missing, install it with the one-liner (no Python, no runtime deps):

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -LsSf \
  https://github.com/montezuma-p/harken/releases/latest/download/harken-installer.sh | sh
# Batch: files, dirs, or globs (model loads once per run)
harken ~/Downloads/audios/*.opus --out /path/to/transcripts

# WhatsApp export zip: no manual unzip needed; dates inclusive
# (quote paths with spaces using $HOME — a quoted ~ does not expand)
harken whatsapp "$HOME/Downloads/WhatsApp Chat - X.zip" \
  --from 2026-07-13 --to 2026-07-14 --out /path/to/out --merge
  • Outputs: per-file .txt + manifest.jsonl (source, text, duration) in --out. Existing outputs are skipped; --force redoes them.
  • --merge writes _chat.transcribed.txt — the chat with each voice note's transcript inlined (>> [transcript] ...).
  • Defaults: --lang pt, --model small, CPU (safe everywhere, no GPU required).
  • --lang auto for non-Portuguese audio; --model medium when accuracy matters more than speed; --model small-q5_1 for a 60% smaller download; --format json|srt|md for timestamps (md is the readable one: one [hh:mm:ss] line per segment).
  • First ever run downloads the ggml model (~466 MB for small) to ~/.cache/harken/models; after that it works fully offline. harken warm (or harken warm --model medium) pre-downloads without transcribing — useful right after installing.
  • Never loop over files one harken invocation each: pass them all in one invocation (the model loads once per run, and per-file runs reload it).
  • If the harken MCP server is connected (claude mcp add harken -- harken mcp), prefer its tools — transcribe_file and transcribe_whatsapp_export — over the shell invocations above; the CLI remains the fallback. Its transcribe_status tool reports the model cache state without transcribing anything — whether the first call would download, or is already waiting on a startup download in flight.
  • Full docs: README.
Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 11d ago First seen · 54 lines · 63 tokens per session scan A d846c1624463

Subscribe to this mod's changes

transcribe-audio is a skill published in the GitHub repository montezuma-p/harken (13 stars, last pushed 9d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 63 tokens to every session and 731 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 1 finding (makes network calls). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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