All the floppy drives I've ever seen had a little mechanical arm attached to a microswitch that detected the presence or absence of the write protect notch. VHS cassettes worked similarly.
I've had great success doing transcription on-prem with Speechmatics: https://www.speechmatics.com They offer both a VM and a Docker image that you can run behind your firewall, and even license offline if you really need to. I use it for generating closed captions of videos, but you could build a transcription tool out of it as well. Their engine's accuracy is the best I've found out there, too, which is a nice bonus.
The exact opposite for me -- I’ve been interested in using FastAPI with SQLAlchemy for some time, so this project is exactly what I’ve been looking for.