Cockatiel

Local-first audio annotation tool with WebAssembly VAD segmentation and multi-format export (EAF, SRT, TextGrid, CSV).

Features

• Automatic segmentation — voice activity detection via Silero VAD (WebAssembly) or energy-based fallback
• Waveform editor — drag, resize, split, merge, and delete segments directly on the waveform
• Speaker assignment — assign segments to speakers with configurable names and colours
• Looping playback — click a region to loop it while transcribing
• Keyboard-driven workflow — split (S), delete (Delete), merge (M), navigate ([/]), skip (←/→), and more. Press ? to see all shortcuts
• Multi-format export — EAF (ELAN), SRT, TextGrid (Praat), CSV, and plain text
• Privacy first — all processing runs locally in the browser; no audio leaves your device

Getting started

pnpm install
pnpm run download:wasm   # fetch Silero VAD WASM binary
pnpm run dev

Open http://localhost:5173 and drop an audio file to begin.

Loading audio from a URL

Cockatiel can also load audio from a remote https URL. There are two ways to do it:

• Paste URL — use the URL input below the drop zone and click Load URL.
• Deep link — open cockatiel with an ?audio= query parameter, e.g. https://your-cockatiel-host/?audio=https://catalog.example.org/path/to/audio.wav. Cockatiel will fetch the file, show its size for confirmation, then segment it. The link stays in the URL bar so it can be shared.

Sessions sourced from a URL are stored against that URL — revisiting the same link restores the saved transcript instantly and re-downloads the audio in the background.

CORS requirements

Cockatiel fetches remote audio directly from your browser. The hosting server must allow cross-origin reads from cockatiel's origin. Specifically the server must return, for the audio URL:

• Access-Control-Allow-Origin: <cockatiel-origin> (or *)
• Access-Control-Allow-Methods: GET and Access-Control-Allow-Headers: Range — cockatiel issues a small range-GET (Range: bytes=0-0) to discover the file size before downloading. A range-GET is used instead of HEAD so that signed URLs (e.g. S3 presigned URLs, which sign a specific HTTP method) continue to work.

If the server doesn't send these headers the load will fail with a CORS error. The privacy-first claim still holds — audio goes from the source server straight to your browser; cockatiel has no backend that sees the bytes.

Only https: URLs are accepted.

Scripts

Command	Description
pnpm dev	Start dev server
pnpm build	Type-check and build for production
pnpm preview	Preview production build
pnpm lint:biome	Lint and format with Biome
pnpm lint:knip	Find unused code with Knip
pnpm lint:types	Type-check with TypeScript
pnpm test	Run tests with Vitest

Tech stack

• React + TypeScript
• Vite — build tool
• wavesurfer.js — waveform rendering and audio playback
• Zustand — state management
• Tailwind CSS — styling
• Silero VAD — voice activity detection (WASM)
• Biome — linting and formatting
• Lefthook — git hooks

Hosting

Cockatiel uses SharedArrayBuffer (for the Silero VAD pthread workers), which requires the page to be cross-origin isolated. That in turn requires the host to send:

• Cross-Origin-Opener-Policy: same-origin
• Cross-Origin-Embedder-Policy: credentialless

The Vite dev and preview servers set these headers automatically (see vite.config.ts). On GitHub Pages — which cannot send custom response headers — we ship the coi-serviceworker shim, which registers a service worker that injects the headers on every request. The credentialless mode (rather than require-corp) is what lets cockatiel still fetch public audio URLs from catalogue servers that don't set Cross-Origin-Resource-Policy.

Licence

MIT