Moonshine is an edge-optimized ASR family built for CPU-only machines. Unlike Whisper it processes variable-length audio (no padding everything to 30 s), which keeps latency low on short clips — sub-200 ms class on capture buffers. It's the lightest local option for quick transcription on hardware where even int8 whisper-large is too slow.

• Install one of the runtimes into the app venv: uv pip install moonshine-onnx (lighter, tried first) or moonshine-voice.
• Then Model Catalogue → Engines, ASR tab → Use on the Moonshine row, or OMNIVOICE_ASR_BACKEND=moonshine.

Auto-detect never picks it; it's an explicit opt-in.

• Quick notes and short-clip transcription on low-power CPU machines.
• Environments where a sub-1 GB footprint matters more than word timing or language coverage.

• Dubbing. Output is plain text as a single segment spanning the whole file — no word or segment timestamps — so there's nothing for lip-sync or subtitle timing to work with. Use a Whisper-family engine or sherpa-onnx-asr for those jobs.
• Multilingual work: results report English; for broad language coverage use whisperx or funasr.

CPU only, by design — macOS, Windows, and Linux. It claims no GPU.

ASR_MODEL_MOONSHINE — default moonshine/base. Weights download on first load — see downloading-models.

• The engine tries moonshine_onnx first and falls back to moonshine_voice — installing either one is enough.
• Segment bounds are synthesized from the audio duration (start 0, end = file length), since the model reports none.