Import a transcript
The simplest route in: you already have the text, and Tomes turns it into a chronicle. Nothing to install, no GPU, no Python.
Tomes doesn't care where the text came from — a previous Whisper run, a manual notetaker, a NotebookLM export, a Discord chat log, a Roll20 or Foundry log, or a transcript someone else produced.
The short version
- Open the Chronicle tab.
- Paste your transcript into the Raw transcript box.
- Set a campaign name and session number, then Begin the Chronicle.
That's the whole route. Everything after it is the same six-phase pipeline the other two routes feed.
What good input looks like
The pipeline works from whatever it's given, but it works better with some structure:
- Speaker labels help enormously. A line like
[Kaziel] I open the dooris far easier to attribute than a bare stream of prose. If your source has them in any form, keep them. - Timestamps are optional. They give the chunker better segmentation boundaries, but plain text is perfectly workable.
- Length is not a problem. The chunker sizes input to whichever model each phase is routed to; a three-hour session is ordinary.
A glossary matters more than the transcript's polish. Phase 1 grounds names against your glossary and lore, so a transcript riddled with misheard fantasy names still comes out right — provided the correct spellings are in the Tome of Lore. Fix a name once and it stays fixed for every future session.
On an AMD or Intel GPU? Read this before you go hunting
If you're here because the built-in transcriber won't use your card, this is the relevant background — it only accelerates on NVIDIA, and it's natural to assume some other Whisper build will use your card. Here's what I found when I actually went looking, to save you the same afternoon:
| Project | Prebuilt GPU backends | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| whisper.cpp | CPU, BLAS (still CPU), CUDA | Its Vulkan backend exists in source but is not in any release build. You'd have to compile it yourself with the Vulkan SDK. |
| sherpa-onnx | CPU, CUDA | No DirectML build shipped. |
| Const-me/Whisper | DirectCompute — any DirectX 11 GPU | Genuinely works on AMD and Intel. Windows-only, and no release since July 2023. |
So the only ready-made thing that will actually use an AMD or Intel card is Const-me/Whisper, and it's been unmaintained for years. If you're willing to accept that, it produces plain text you can paste straight in via this route.
Compiling whisper.cpp with GGML_VULKAN=1 yourself works well, and Tomes
has a whisper.cpp bridge built in for exactly
that case. It detects your build, reads its capability line so it can tell
you outright if you've ended up with a CPU-only binary, and falls back to the
built-in engine rather than failing a run. Nothing is downloaded; you supply
the build and the model.
If neither appeals, importing YouTube captions needs no GPU at all and is the route I'd point most people to.
Next
- Recommended settings — what to run once you're in
- Import YouTube captions — if you'd rather not paste
- Choosing a provider — which model runs this