trnscrb

trnscrb is a free and open-source macOS tool built for people who want meeting notes without sending their conversations to a cloud service. It lives in the menu bar and watches for the signs of a live meeting — your microphone becoming active for a few seconds while Google Meet, Zoom, Slack Huddle, Microsoft Teams, or FaceTime is running. When both conditions are met it starts capturing audio locally, either just your microphone or your mic plus system audio through the free BlackHole virtual driver.

Once the call ends, the audio is transcribed on device with the Whisper small model accelerated by Apple Silicon Metal, so no internet connection is required and no recording is uploaded anywhere. Audio is deleted after transcription. Output is deliberately simple: plain .txt files written to your ~/meeting-notes/ folder, with no database and no proprietary format.

The clever part is the Claude Desktop integration. trnscrb registers a set of MCP tools that let Claude start and stop recordings, check recording status, pull the latest or a specific transcript, read your current calendar event, and search across meetings. That turns your local transcript folder into a queryable memory — you can ask what your action items were, what a colleague committed to, or how often a topic has come up. Speaker labels require a free HuggingFace account; optional summarisation and action-item extraction require running the enrich command, which is the only step that sends transcript text to an API.