Cassini is a call-recording and transcription backend for Nextcloud Talk. It exists because the default recorder shipped with Nextcloud Talk kept crashing our calls.
We run our own infrastructure as a matter of principle — Zulip, Nextcloud, the rest — and we wanted live transcriptions during meetings and post-call summaries feeding into our working notes. The default Nextcloud Talk recording module is architected as a headless browser that joins each call as a participant, running on the same server as Nextcloud Talk itself. That turned out to be heavy enough to take the whole thing down with it.
Silvio started Cassini as a vibe-engineered side project. Partly to scratch an immediate itch — he had a habit of zoning out in long calls and wanting to catch up on what he had missed — and partly because there was an architectural call worth getting right: a recorder for calls should be modular and composable, and light enough during the call that it does not compromise the call itself. Transcription and summarisation can happen after; only capture needs to be live.
Cassini is in active development. The current work is the move from personal hack to shippable Nextcloud app — embedding the transcript viewer, swapping Cassini in as the transcription backend, and getting it onto the Nextcloud app marketplace so it can stand alongside the default as a drop-in alternative.
Cassini is also the start of something broader for us. We are positioning behind open-source, privacy-focused, LLM-based infrastructure for small companies — software that small teams can run on their own terms, rather than only renting access to. Cassini is the first concrete piece of that direction.
