digimata/quill

Quill is a small macOS app that sits in your menu bar and records meetings. Click one button in the menu bar and it starts recording your microphone and everything the computer plays, such as the other people on a video call, as two separate audio tracks. Click stop, and it automatically transcribes both tracks into text, with each speaker labeled. Everything happens on your own Mac. No audio or text is sent anywhere else. Each recording session is saved in its own folder inside your Recordings directory, named with the date and time. That folder holds the raw audio from your microphone, the raw audio from the system, a small file with timing details, and the finished transcript in two formats, one for machines to read and one plain text version for you to read. Recording your voice and the other side of a call as two separate tracks makes the transcript more accurate and makes it easy to tell who said what without any extra speaker recognition step. Transcription runs automatically using a built in, on device speech model. The first time you transcribe something, it downloads a roughly 600 megabyte model, and after that it works without an internet connection. Transcription is fast on newer Apple computers with Apple Silicon chips. You can start a new recording while an older one is still being transcribed, and if the app quits partway through a job, it will pick that job back up the next time it runs. Quill is meant to be installed once and then mostly forgotten, running quietly in the background and starting automatically when you log in if you choose that option. It is configurable through a simple settings file, where you can change where recordings are saved, turn transcription on or off, and set up a command that runs automatically once a transcript is ready, for example to summarize it or file it away. Currently the transcription only understands English, though the project notes that support for other languages is planned. Quill requires a fairly recent version of macOS because it relies on newer system audio recording features, and it currently only exists as a command line and menu bar tool without a full graphical app, so installing it means building it from source with Swift's build tools.