Steno

quill is a fully local, ultra-minimalist macOS meeting recorder and transcriber developed by digimata. It runs as a single Swift menu-bar binary and uses macOS Core Audio process taps to capture microphone and system audio as separate CAF tracks without a virtual audio device or kernel extension. After recording stops, quill transcribes each track on the device, shifts the results by their start offsets, and merges the timestamped segments into a speaker-tagged transcript. The separate microphone and system tracks provide two-party diarization without a speaker-identification model. Each session produces the audio tracks, metadata, canonical JSON and Markdown transcripts, and a transcription log in a recordings directory. The default on-device transcription engine is Parakeet TDT 0.6B v2 through FluidAudio's Core ML port. It requires macOS 15 or later, supports optional launch-at-login operation, and can resume unfinished transcription jobs after relaunch. A WhisperKit fallback or re-transcription engine is planned.

OpenWhispr is an open-source, cross-platform desktop voice-to-text application for macOS, Windows, and Linux. A global hotkey captures speech and inserts the resulting text at the cursor in another application; dictation can use local Whisper or NVIDIA Parakeet speech-to-text engines, where audio remains on the device, or cloud providers through user-supplied keys. It also supports dictation translation, AI-agent commands, meeting transcription with speaker diarization and voice fingerprinting, audio and video transcription, and searchable notes with semantic search and optional cloud sync. The application is built with Electron, React, TypeScript, SQLite, whisper.cpp, and sherpa-onnx, and provides an API and MCP server for programmatic access to notes and transcriptions. The repository describes it as having no data collection or telemetry and distributes installers for the three supported desktop platforms. It is licensed under the MIT license.

VoiceStudio is an open-source, fully local desktop application for voice cloning and design, text-to-speech, transcription, dictation, video dubbing, and long-form audio production. It runs on macOS Apple Silicon, Windows, Linux, or Docker and keeps voices, projects, settings, and generated files on the machine by default. The application combines a Tauri desktop shell, a React and Vite interface, and a local FastAPI backend with registries for multiple TTS and ASR engines. Its workflows can transcribe and translate video, preserve speaker assignments, synthesize replacement speech, render audiobook chapters, separate vocals, diarize speakers, process batch jobs, and route work to CPU, CUDA, Apple Silicon MPS/MLX, ROCm, or optional remote workers. It also exposes local REST, SSE, WebSocket, OpenAI-compatible audio, and MCP interfaces, including speech synthesis and transcription endpoints. VoiceStudio is licensed under AGPL-3.0; downloaded models and tokenizers retain their own licenses. The local workflow requires no account, API key, subscription, or usage meter, although remote workers, configured external ASR endpoints, analytics, and other network-backed functions are opt-in. The repository describes the software as an active beta and distributes packaged desktop releases as well as source code.

Omarchy Meeting Recorder is a local meeting-recording application for Omarchy on Hyprland, built with Rust, GTK 4 and libadwaita. It captures microphone audio and the computer's output as separate tracks, then uses whisper-rs and a local Whisper model to produce a timestamped transcript with speaker labels. Recordings can also be imported from files; imported single-track audio uses NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Diarization through ONNX Runtime to distinguish speakers locally. The application provides an editable transcript, waveform playback synchronized with transcript lines, speaker renaming, chapter markers, pause and crash recovery, command-line controls, and optional bar-widget integration. Chapters can be generated by the configured Omarchy coding agent; in that case, the transcript text is sent to that agent, while recording and transcription otherwise remain on the user's computer. It stores meetings as folders containing audio, Markdown transcripts, metadata, and separate track files. The project is distributed under the MIT license and can be installed from the Omarchy package repository or built from source.

Qwen Scribe is a private, local transcription and system-wide dictation application for Apple Silicon Macs. It runs Qwen3-ASR through mlx-qwen3-asr on the Mac's Metal GPU, keeping audio and transcripts on the computer without an account, API key, or cloud service. Users can drag audio or video into a local web interface, transcribe with automatic or forced language selection, vocabulary hints, word timestamps, and SRT export, and search or export local transcript history. A menu-bar helper provides push-to-talk dictation in text fields, displaying listening and transcription states in a non-focus-stealing HUD before pasting the result at the cursor. The project requires macOS 14 or newer, Apple Silicon, Python 3.12 or newer, and ffmpeg for non-WAV audio and video. It offers Qwen3-ASR 1.7B and 0.6B model options; model weights are downloaded separately and require roughly 3.4 GB or 1.2 GB of unified memory respectively, in addition to application overhead. It is distributed as a downloadable beta Mac app or can be built from source; the repository describes the project as version 0.2.1-beta.1.