v2.18.0 — a headless install is 650 MB lighter¶
Released 2026-08-13. Upgrade:
Qt is the desktop extra now¶
A uv tool install was 1.1 GB, and 648 MB of it — 59% — was PySide6, present for exactly two features: the voice-activity overlay and the system tray. Every install that could never display either paid the full price — servers, containers, CI, and anyone who only runs yazses transcribe, which does not import Qt at all.
Nothing regresses for a desktop user. install.sh, the .deb and the Snap all pull the desktop extra, so the tray and the overlay appear exactly as before, and yazses features enable tray|overlay fetches Qt afterwards for anyone who changes their mind later. Base dependencies go 17 → 16.
Two ways this could have broken people, both closed and both pinned by tests. The Snap never staged PySide6 — it arrived as a base dependency — and a snap can never pip-install at runtime (read-only squashfs plus PEP 668), so shipping this without adding it to python-packages would have removed both features for the life of the revision, unrecoverably. And tray was missing from _FEATURE_DEPS, so enabling the tray on a headless install could not have fetched its own dependency.
Chinese users were being handed the wrong alphabet¶
New [stt] chinese_script. Whisper decides Simplified vs Traditional per utterance, which means a user in Taipei could get Simplified characters for one sentence and Traditional for the next, from the same voice and the same microphone. The setting pins the script instead of leaving it to the decoder's mood.
The project asks, once, in the two places someone is actually looking¶
YazSes had ~583 PyPI downloads a week and four stars. The gap was not that people disliked it; it was that nothing ever asked. The single existing ask sat on line 616 of a 616-line README — the last line of the file — and the CLI and docs never asked at all.
yazses quickstart now closes with one line pointing at the repo, and the README asks immediately after the demo, where a reader has just watched it work rather than after scrolling past the licence. It is deliberately not a nag: quickstart is read-only and explicitly invoked, the line never prompts, never blocks, and appears once per invocation.
The DCO sign-off gate is gone¶
It was quietly unfixable for browser contributors — GitHub's web editor cannot add a Signed-off-by trailer, so anyone contributing a translation or a docs fix from the browser hit a red check they had no way to clear. Removed from all three repositories.
Also¶
- Russian README contributed by @4nmus — the first Cyrillic-script translation the project has had — plus Simplified Chinese README and docs
- Indic heading anchors stopped dropping every vowel sign (Devanagari, Tamil, Bengali, Telugu); the stock slugifier deleted the combining marks
install-apt.shfailed on every container and fresh VM — it read$USERunderset -euo pipefail, and$USERis set by the login shell, not by the kernel- Loading an already-downloaded model still contacted Hugging Face, so a machine that had everything it needed still failed offline
- A filterable task finder, a self-serve first-contribution page, and the contributor taxonomy actually applied to the issue tracker
The full list for this release is in CHANGELOG.md.