How I Stopped Empty Tray Captures From Reaching Whisper in Yapper

The bug was not transcription quality The first sign of trouble was not in the output text. It was in the workflow. Yapper tray mode would finish a recording, hand it off, and still proceed toward transcription even when the capture had no speech worth sending upstream. That is a bad use of a speech-to-text pipeline, because the expensive part of the system should only run when the input has a real chance of producing text. I knew immediately that this was not a model problem. Whisper was doing exactly what I asked it to do. The mistake was earlier: I was asking too often. In a background tray app, that distinction matters a lot. A single empty capture is annoying. A stream of them turns into wasted requests, noisy logs, and a system that feels busy without being useful. That is why the fix lives in the tray experience and in the settings UI, not in the transcription layer itself. In app/settings_ui.py , Yapper now exposes a Voice Activity Detection section with a toggle and a threshol