Project ECHO is an open-source AI pipeline from Commonwealth Bank of Australia that transcribes audio and generates vision-model scene descriptions from archival video footage, turning collections such as VHS and Betamax tapes into a searchable knowledge base.

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License

MIT

Last updated

2026-07-31

AI repository intelligence
FR-AI / ANALYSIS

Why it is worth attention

It is a rare instance of a major bank open-sourcing an applied AI/media-archival system, combining Whisper transcription, VLM-based frame descriptions, optional LLM summarisation, and configurable local/S3 storage with SQLite/DynamoDB backends.

Who it is for

  • Archivists and digital-preservation teams managing legacy magnetic-tape collections
  • Developers building searchable video or audio archives
  • ML engineers deploying self-hosted OpenAI-compatible Whisper, vision, and LLM endpoints
  • Organisations with large video libraries needing batch cataloguing and metadata extraction

Use cases

  • Transcribe and visually describe digitised VHS, Betamax, and other magnetic-tape footage
  • Create timestamped transcripts and keyframe scene descriptions for archive catalogues
  • Batch-process media from local filesystems or S3 into SQLite or DynamoDB
  • Generate multi-modal Markdown summaries of footage when summarisation is enabled

Strengths

  • Storage and database backends are independently configurable, so it can run from a laptop with sufficient video memory to production infrastructure
  • Designed for any OpenAI-compatible service, including self-hosted vLLM deployments
  • Includes operational safety nets such as max file size, max Whisper chunks, max frames per video, dry-run, and refresh controls
  • Provides tested code with mocked external services and an enforced 80% coverage, plus a clear CLI and configuration reference

Considerations

  • Requires external OpenAI-compatible transcription and vision endpoints, so it is not a fully self-contained offline pipeline
  • Published for research, educational, and community purposes only; it is not a CBA production system, is not advice, and is provided 'as is' without warranty
  • Default model names such as gpt-4o and gpt-5.2 and endpoint settings must be adjusted to the models actually deployed; the README does not describe an end-user search UI

README quick start

Quick Start

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