Backchannel Documentation

Backchannel is a real-time meeting analysis app. A React frontend captures microphone (and optionally tab/system) audio, streams it to a FastAPI backend over WebSocket, and the backend produces a speaker-attributed transcript while a set of provider-routed AI agents surface questions, observations, opportunities, objections, and action items as the conversation happens. The call’s command bar also answers a question put to the conversation so far, without interrupting it (Agent System).

This folder is the deeper technical reference behind the top-level README. For how Backchannel differs from the other meeting assistants people evaluate, the public site’s comparison hub indexes every open-source and commercial comparison.

For desktop operations, Releasing and the private R2 manifests are authoritative. GitHub releases retain public source tags and notes without executable files; the executables themselves are free public downloads from the download portal. The Cloudflare Access-protected operator console remains for the account machinery behind the deployed desktop updater’s grant flow: it separates Early access request/consent approval and rejection, Users identity/security commands, and Authorization Latest/explicit-version grants. Authorization is stored in release_access_policies plus release_account_versions; the old /api/admin/access/* routes are removed. Recipient accounts, grants, sessions, and access events live in D1, not the local application’s PostgreSQL database.

Contents

Page	What it covers
Quickstart	Running with Docker Compose, local development, database migrations, tests
Getting API Keys	Creating a Google Gemini or OpenAI key and connecting it under Admin -> Connections
Architecture	The live call path end to end, frontend structure, backend key files
Agent System	The orchestrator, each agent’s trigger and purpose, configuration and overrides
Audio Pipeline	Capture format, VAD and diarization, batch transcription routing, audio storage
WebSocket Protocol	Binary audio framing and every JSON message type on /ws/{session_id}
REST API	Endpoint reference for all routers, grouped by resource
Configuration	Settings, environment variables, encrypted credentials, the model registry
Deployment	Docker Compose plus the ordered D1, R2, Worker, Turnstile, and release-access production gate
Releasing	Authoritative private-R2 publication, migration, verification, and recovery procedure

Reading order

If you are new to the codebase, read Quickstart to get the stack running, then Architecture for the mental model, then Agent System – most feature work touches one of those three areas. The protocol and API pages are references to consult as needed.

Release-access documentation changes must pass:

cd docs-site
npm run test:release-access
npm run test:migration
npm run test:worker
npm run test:admin
npm run test:download
npm run test:site
node --test *.test.js
npm run build