Tironian Notes - Free meeting recorder and transcriber for Mac. No cloud.

Tironian Notes — your private recorder, transcriber, and conversation analysis tool. Completely free. All conversations, transcriptions, and summaries are stored locally on your machine. Works with online calls in any messaging app. Supports offline conversations. No bots joining your calls. Flexible post-processing with popular LLMs or local models. Speaker recognition: once you name speakers, the app gradually learns to recognize them automatically.

I built Tironian Notes after realizing that every call I had recorded with cloud-based transcription services was sitting on someone else’s servers. I had no idea who could access it or what might happen to that data later. That led to a simple idea: what if a modern Mac were capable of handling transcription locally instead of relying on cloud services? Tironian Notes records audio, transcribes it with Whisper, identifies speakers, and generates LLM-powered summaries, all directly on your Mac. Nothing is sent anywhere. The name comes from Tiro, Cicero’s secretary, who invented classical shorthand in 63 BC. The challenge of accurately capturing speech hasn’t really changed over the centuries, only the tools have. Happy to answer any questions about how it works, why I made certain design decisions, or what’s coming next. And if you try it, let me know how your first transcript goes.

Tironian Notes - Free meeting recorder and transcriber for Mac. No cloud.

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