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Meeting Transcriber

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A native macOS menu bar app that automatically detects, records, transcribes, and summarizes your meetings — fully on-device, no cloud transcription.

         ┌──────────────────────┐         ┌──────────────────────┐
         │   Meeting Detected   │         │     File Import      │
         │  Teams / Zoom / Webex│         │ WAV MP3 M4A MP4 MKV  │
         └──────────┬───────────┘         └──────────┬───────────┘
                    │                                │
                    ▼                                ▼
         ┌──────────────────────┐         ┌──────────────────────┐
         │   Dual Recording     │         │   16kHz Mono Convert │
         │  App Audio + Mic     │         │  AVAudioFile/ffmpeg  │
         │  (16kHz per track)   │         │                      │
         └──────────┬───────────┘         └──────────┬───────────┘
                    │                                │
                    └────────────────┬───────────────┘
                                     ▼
                        ┌──────────────────────────┐
                        │   Transcription Engine   │
                        │ ┌──────────┬───────────┐ │
                        │ │ Whisper  │FluidAudio │ │
                        │ │   Kit    │ Parakeet  │ │
                        │ │          │ Qwen3-ASR │ │
                        │ └──────────┴───────────┘ │
                        │      CoreML / ANE        │
                        └────────────┬─────────────┘
                                     ▼
                         ┌────────────────────────┐
                         │  Speaker Diarization   │
                         │  FluidAudio CoreML/ANE │
                         │  + Speaker Recognition │
                         └───────────┬────────────┘
                                     ▼
                         ┌────────────────────────┐
                         │  Protocol Generation   │
                         │  Claude CLI / OpenAI   │
                         └───────────┬────────────┘
                                     ▼
                         ┌────────────────────────┐
                         │   Markdown Protocol    │
                         │  Summary · Decisions   │
                         │  Tasks · Transcript    │
                         └────────────────────────┘

Features

  • Automatic meeting detection — Recognizes Teams, Zoom, and Webex meetings via window title polling
  • Dual audio recording — App audio (CATapDescription) + microphone simultaneously
  • On-device transcription — Three engines, selectable in Settings:
    • WhisperKit — 99+ languages, ~1 GB model
    • Parakeet TDT v3 (NVIDIA) — 25 EU languages, ~50 MB model, ~10× faster, custom vocabulary support (CTC boosting)
    • Qwen3-ASR (Alibaba) — 30 languages, ~1.75 GB model, macOS 15+
  • On-device speaker diarization — FluidAudio via CoreML/ANE — no HuggingFace token needed; two modes: standard (OfflineDiarizer) and overlap-aware (Sortformer)
  • Dual-track diarization — App and mic tracks diarized separately for clean speaker separation without echo interference
  • Speaker recognition — Voice embeddings stored across meetings, matched via cosine similarity
  • VAD preprocessing — Optional silence trimming via FluidAudio Silero v6 before transcription, with automatic timestamp remapping
  • AI protocol generation — Structured Markdown via Claude Code CLI, OpenAI-compatible APIs (Ollama, LM Studio, etc.), or disabled (save transcript only)
  • Configurable protocol prompt — Custom prompt file support (~/Library/Application Support/MeetingTranscriber/protocol_prompt.md)
  • Manual recording — Record any app via app picker, not just detected meetings
  • Multi-format input — Supports WAV, MP3, M4A, MP4, and with ffmpeg also MKV, WebM, OGG
  • Update checker — Notifies when a new version is available
  • Background processing — PipelineQueue runs transcription and protocol generation independently from recording
  • Distribution — Install via Homebrew Cask or build from source

Prerequisites

  • macOS 14.2+ (required for CATapDescription audio capture)
  • One of:
    • Claude Code CLI — installed and logged in (claude --version)
    • An OpenAI-compatible API endpoint (e.g. Ollama, LM Studio, llama.cpp) — configure in Settings

No HuggingFace token needed — FluidAudio and WhisperKit download their models automatically on first run.

Optional: ffmpeg for extra formats

Install ffmpeg to enable MKV, WebM, and OGG support:

brew install ffmpeg

The app detects ffmpeg automatically. Status is shown in Settings → About.

Using Ollama as provider

  1. Install Ollama: brew install ollama
  2. Pull a model: ollama pull llama3.1 (or any model that fits your hardware)
  3. Start the server: ollama serve (runs on http://localhost:11434 by default)
  4. In the app's Settings, select OpenAI-Compatible API as provider and set:
    • Endpoint: http://localhost:11434/v1/chat/completions
    • Model: llama3.1 (must match the pulled model name)

Installation

Via Homebrew Cask (recommended)

brew tap pasrom/meeting-transcriber
brew install --cask meeting-transcriber

Pre-release (RC) via Homebrew

brew tap pasrom/meeting-transcriber
brew install --cask meeting-transcriber@beta

Note: The stable and beta casks conflict — uninstall one before installing the other.

Build from source

git clone https://github.com/pasrom/meeting-transcriber
cd meeting-transcriber
./scripts/run_app.sh

Permissions

Permission Required for Notes
Screen Recording Meeting detection (window titles) System Settings → Privacy & Security
Microphone Mic recording Prompted on first use
Accessibility Mute detection, participant reading (Teams) System Settings → Privacy & Security
App audio capture — No permission needed (purple dot indicator only)

Menu Bar Icon

The app uses an animated waveform icon in the menu bar that reflects the current pipeline stage:

Idle   Recording   Transcribing   Diarizing   Protocol

Idle → Recording (bars bounce) → Transcribing (bars morph to text) → Diarizing (bars split into groups) → Protocol (lines appear sequentially)

Permission problem badge

Permission problem

A red exclamation mark in the bottom-right corner is overlaid on top of the current icon (idle, recording, transcribing, …) whenever one of the required permissions is missing or broken. It means at least one of the following is not in a working state:

  • Microphone — denied, or granted but the capture engine can't open the device
  • Screen Recording — denied, or granted but CGWindowListCopyWindowInfo returns no window titles (TCC state out of sync)
  • Accessibility — denied, or granted but the AX API refuses to read Teams participant/mute info

The health check distinguishes denied from broken. "Broken" usually means the permission is toggled on in System Settings but macOS hasn't actually wired it through — the fix is to toggle the permission off and on again for Meeting Transcriber under System Settings → Privacy & Security. Open the menu bar dropdown to see which specific permission is affected; a notification is also posted when the state changes.

Record-only mode badge

Record-only mode

A small red dot in the bottom-right corner is overlaid on top of the current icon (idle, recording, transcribing, …) whenever Record-only mode is enabled (Settings → General → "Record-only mode"). In this mode the app keeps detecting meetings and producing dual-source recordings, but skips the entire post-recording pipeline (VAD, transcription, diarization, protocol generation). Recordings + a per-meeting <timestamp>_meta.json sidecar are dropped into your configured Output Folder for an external pipeline (e.g. a Linux GPU host via Syncthing) to pick up. The dot stays visible across all states so the mode is always clearly indicated; if a permission problem coexists, the red exclamation badge takes precedence.

Usage

Launch the app — it sits in your menu bar. When a supported meeting is detected, recording starts automatically. When the meeting ends, the pipeline runs in the background: transcription → diarization → protocol generation.

You can also batch-process existing audio and video files via the menu (⌘P) — supported formats: WAV, MP3, M4A, MP4 (and MKV, WebM, OGG when ffmpeg is installed).

Configuration

Open Settings via the menu bar item or ⌘,.

Settings window

Tab What's in it
General Apps to watch (Teams/Zoom/Webex), detection timing, update checks
Audio Microphone device, voice activity detection (VAD)
Transcribe ASR engine (WhisperKit / Parakeet / Qwen3) and per-engine options (model, language, custom vocabulary)
Speakers Diarization, mic speaker name, known voices, recognition stats
Output LLM provider (Claude CLI / OpenAI-compatible / none), protocol language, output folder, custom prompt
Advanced Permissions status, diagnostics, version info

Output

Files are saved to ~/Library/Application Support/MeetingTranscriber/protocols/:

File Content
20260225_1400_meeting.txt Raw transcript
20260225_1400_meeting.md Structured protocol

Protocol structure: Summary, Participants, Topics Discussed, Decisions, Tasks (with responsible person, deadline, priority), Open Questions, Full Transcript.

Troubleshooting

Problem Solution
claude not found Install Claude Code CLI, run claude --version — or switch to OpenAI-compatible provider in Settings
No meeting detected Grant Screen Recording permission (System Settings → Privacy & Security)
No app audio Requires macOS 14.2+ for CATapDescription audio capture
Empty transcription Check that the file contains an audio track — the app converts to 16 kHz mono automatically
Models not loading Models download on first run (WhisperKit ~1 GB, Parakeet ~50 MB, Qwen3 ~1.75 GB); check internet connectivity
OpenAI-compatible API connection failed Verify the endpoint URL and that the local model server is running

Diagnosing silent app-audio recordings

If a recording's _app.wav is silent or unexpectedly quiet, enable verbose audio logging to capture forensic detail during the next attempt:

  1. Open Settings → Diagnostics and turn on Verbose Audio Logging.
  2. Reproduce the failing recording.
  3. Open Console.app, filter by subsystem com.meetingtranscriber.audiotap, and look for [debug] lines:
    • [debug] Tap target: pid=… exe=… bundle=… audioObjectID=… — which process the tap targeted
    • [debug] Default output device: name=… uid=… transport=… rate=… — output device at start
    • [debug] Tap format: rate=… Hz, tapID=… — sample rate and tap ID after the tap is configured
    • [debug] App audio RMS (5s): …dBFS, samples=…, totalBytes=… — every 5 seconds; tells you live whether the tap is delivering real audio (-40 dBFS or higher) or near-silence (≤ -90 dBFS)
    • [debug] Output device change → name=… uid=… — emitted when the system output device changes mid-recording
    • [debug] Mic input device: name=… uid=… hwRate=… hwChannels=… — mic hardware device at capture start
    • [debug] Mic RMS (5s): …dBFS, samples=… — every 5 seconds during mic capture
  4. Turn the toggle off again when done — the per-5 s RMS log is moderately chatty.

The toggle persists in UserDefaults and takes effect on the next recording without an app restart.

License

MIT

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macOS meeting transcription app with speaker diarization

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v0.4.1 Latest
Mar 15, 2026
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