Privacy

What leaves your Mac depends on your choices:

• Scribe (--transcriber scribe): the 16 kHz mono audio of the whole recording goes to OpenRouter.
• The judge: the transcript sentences, the guidelines, your editing preferences, the topic and the candidate lists go to the judge’s provider. With claude that is Anthropic, through Claude Code. With a shell command it is whatever provider that command calls. The dry-run judge sends nothing.
• Overlay research: when visuals are on, the URLs the judge proposes are fetched, and pages are screenshotted with chrome-devtools-axi if it is installed. --no-research turns this off.
• Whisper and Parakeet: the audio stays on your machine. Whisper downloads its model from Hugging Face once.

What stays local: the video, the master, the render, the verification and the report.

Where data is kept:

• ~/.cache/talkinghead/ holds the content-addressed cache: transcripts (the words spoken), silences, and voice analysis, each keyed on the hash of the audio it came from. It also holds bin/, a helper cache for the head-clip check.
• <video stem>.talkinghead/ holds the run: the plan, the report, the preferences snapshot, every judge prompt and answer under llm/, and the stage memos. Prompts include transcript text, so treat a run directory like the recording itself.
• The editing profile directory holds your preferences and every feedback note, with the run directory and source path it refers to.
• The Whisper model lives in the Hugging Face cache, under ~/.cache/huggingface/ unless HF_HOME is set.