Troubleshooting

Parley won’t start

From a terminal, run parley (or the AppImage) to see any error message.

“fusermount: command not found” or similar FUSE errors: install your distribution’s fuse3 package, or run the AppImage with --appimage-extract-and-run.
“GLIBC_2.39 not found”: your distribution is too old. Parley needs Ubuntu 24.04, Debian 13, Fedora 40 or newer.

No sound is being recorded

Open Audio on the Record page and check the Mic and System level bars move when there is sound. If not, pick a different device from the lists.
Parley needs PipeWire. Check with pactl info | grep "Server Name", which should mention PipeWire.
If the other people on a call aren’t being transcribed, make sure System audio is set to the output you’re actually listening on (for example your headset rather than your speakers).

Transcription is slow or falls behind

Use a smaller or quantised model (the ones ending in q5_0 or q5_1) under Settings → Transcription.
If you have a GPU, make sure you installed the Vulkan build: reinstall with PARLEY_VARIANT=vulkan. The log says Vulkan GPU support: enabled when it is in use.

The transcript is inaccurate

Set the Transcription language under Settings → Summary instead of relying on detection.
Add names and jargon to your custom vocabulary.
Re-transcribe with a larger model, or download large-v3-q5_0 so meetings are refined automatically after recording.

Summaries fail or are poor

Check that a model is selected in Settings → Summary. With Built-in AI, make sure its model has finished downloading.
For better summaries, try the Gemma 3 4B built-in model, a larger model in Ollama, or a cloud provider.
With Ollama, check that it’s running (ollama list) and that the Endpoint is right.

Ask says “keyword search only”

“the semantic search model is downloading”: Parley fetches it (about 146 MB) in the background after starting. Leave Parley running with a network connection; Ask switches over by itself.
“embeddings unavailable” with Ollama as your provider: check Ollama is running and run ollama pull nomic-embed-text. See Ask Parley.

Click Send test notification under Settings → Notifications. If it appears, check the Events toggles, that Recording notifications is on (for recording events) and that Manual Do Not Disturb is off. If it doesn’t, check your desktop’s own notification settings and Do Not Disturb mode.

Logs and crash reports

Parley writes a log to ~/.local/state/parley/logs/parley.log (the previous run is kept as parley.log.1). For more detail, start it with:

RUST_LOG=debug parley

If Parley crashes, the log records it, and coredumpctl info parley shows the crash details on most distributions.

Reporting a problem

Open an issue with your distribution, the Parley version (Settings → About), what happened, and the relevant part of the log. Check the log for anything private, such as meeting titles, before sharing it.

Parley User Guide