Local meeting transcription for Mac, with no bot in the call

Most AI meeting assistants work the same way. A bot joins your call as an extra participant, the audio goes to the vendor’s servers, and you pay every month. TranscribeX takes a different route. It runs as a Mac app, captures the call audio on your own machine, and does the transcription with speech recognition models that run locally.

Recording etiquette: TranscribeX does not announce itself in the call, so letting people know is up to you. Recording-consent laws differ by country and state — some require everyone’s permission — so tell participants and get consent before you record. More in the FAQ.

Pick your meeting app

Each platform has its own built-in transcription, with its own plan requirements and host controls. These guides explain what Zoom, Google Meet and Teams offer natively, and how to transcribe each one on a Mac with TranscribeX.

An AI note taker that doesn’t join meetings

Bot-based note takers have to be invited, admitted and kept in the call. That gets harder every year. Zoom now offers hosts several ways to block bots, Google Meet automatically denies third-party bots that ask to join under Trusted or Restricted access, and Microsoft Teams holds detected bots in the lobby by default until someone admits them. A bot also announces itself to everyone, which some people welcome and others find awkward.

TranscribeX is a meeting recorder that sits on your side of the call. It listens to what your Mac plays and what your microphone hears. That means it works as a participant in meetings you don’t host, and in meetings where the organizer’s plan has no transcription at all. The trade-off is that the platform shows no recording notice for it, so telling people is your job.

TranscribeX is not the only tool that works this way. Granola, MacWhisper and the desktop apps from Otter, Fathom and Fireflies can also capture a call without a bot. Where TranscribeX differs is that the transcription itself happens on your Mac and the whole job is paid for once.

From call to recap: the full pipeline

You can use TranscribeX as a plain recorder, or let it handle the whole meeting. Every step can be switched on or off.

1. Detect the call when it starts in a supported app. A short start delay skips the join clicks and notification sounds.
2. Match it to an event in your Mac calendars, so the recording carries the meeting title, date and participants.
3. Record audio only, or audio and video if you want slides and screen shares kept with the words. You choose this per app.
4. Transcribe locally with Whisper, NVIDIA Parakeet, Qwen3 ASR or Apple’s on-device model.
5. Name the speakers with automatic diarization and Voice Profiles, which recognize people you have met before.
6. Summarize into key points, decisions and action items, with your own notes included.
7. Export and email the summary and transcript when the meeting ends, or hold them for review and send with one click.

During the call, a live transcript window shows the conversation as it happens, with an AI chat panel for questions like “what did I miss?” Live captions run on NVIDIA Nemotron streaming models in 30+ languages. The automatic meeting cycle is explained step by step here.

Offline meeting transcription and privacy

The recording is saved on your Mac first, and everything else is built from it. Speech recognition, speaker diarization and the built-in language model all run on the Mac, so a meeting can be transcribed and summarized with Wi-Fi off. Voice Profiles are stored only on your machine.

Some steps do need the internet. Sending the recap by email does, and so does choosing an online AI provider such as ChatGPT or Gemini for a summary. ElevenLabs Scribe and Mistral Voxtral are available as optional online transcription models. Those are choices you make. If you leave them off, the meeting audio never leaves your Mac.

A local AI note taker for summaries

For summaries and chat, TranscribeX can download a small language model (Qwen or Gemma) in one click, or use Apple Intelligence. It runs inside the app with no API key and no account, and there is no charge per summary. If you prefer a larger model, you can connect ChatGPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, Perplexity, Ollama, LM Studio or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint.

Because the summary is written from a transcript that already has speaker names, it can keep track of who agreed to what. You can also chat with the transcript and limit a question to one speaker.

AI note taker with no subscription

Meeting assistants usually charge per user per month. TranscribeX Pro is a single $39 payment with free updates, for one Mac at a time. Here is how that compares over one and three years with the cheapest paid plan of three popular tools.

Cheapest paid individual plan at list price (USD unless marked). Prices checked October 2026 on each vendor’s pricing page (Otter.ai, Granola, Fathom). TranscribeX Pro is a one-time purchase with free updates; the free version has no time limit.

Those subscriptions do include things TranscribeX doesn’t, such as shared team workspaces, web and mobile access to every transcript, and CRM integrations. If you need those, a subscription may be worth it. If you want your own meetings transcribed and summarized on your own Mac, $39 once covers it. See the full Otter and Granola comparisons.

What’s free and what needs Pro

The free version has no time limit and no watermark. It transcribes and exports without limits using Whisper Tiny and Apple’s on-device model, records from your microphone, and imports audio and video files, so a meeting recording you already have can be transcribed for free. Automatic meeting detection, recording audio and video from any Mac app, speaker diarization, live transcription, calendar matching, AI summaries and the automatic export and email steps are part of Pro.