quill

Quill records your meetings and transcribes them entirely on your Mac, with nothing uploaded anywhere. It's a minimal menu-bar app that captures your microphone and system audio as separate tracks, then transcribes both locally, producing timestamped, speaker-tagged transcripts. This is the Quill built in Swift for macOS, not the well-known Quill.js editor, different project, same name.

The whole design is private-by-default. Using Core Audio process taps and on-device ML, your meeting audio never leaves the machine, which is exactly the opposite of how Otter.ai, Fireflies, Granola, and Fathom work.

Free under MIT. For anyone who takes calls on a Mac and doesn't want a SaaS vendor holding their conversations, it's a straight replacement for a paid subscription at zero cost.

The catch is the boundaries it draws on purpose. It's macOS 15 and up only, English-only transcription for now, and there's no cloud sync or AI summaries by design, if you want those, this isn't trying to be that. What it does, private local transcription, it does cleanly. Match it to that job and it's excellent.