Carbon
Transcribes your Mac meetings on-device and saves each as a Markdown file — no bot, no cloud.
Carbon sits in the Mac menu bar and starts transcribing automatically whenever Zoom, Meet, Teams or any other app grabs your microphone, labeling who said what and saving each meeting as a plain Markdown file in ~/Carbon. Transcription runs entirely with Apple's on-device speech recognition — it needs macOS 26 — and the audio itself gets deleted once the transcript is written, unless you turn on keep-audio. It never joins the call as a bot, which also means disclosing the recording to others is explicitly left to you. It's free and MIT licensed.
What holds up
- +Free and MIT licensed — the code is public on GitHub, not just a free tier of a paid product.
- +Never joins as a bot and needs no account, analytics or server — nothing leaves your Mac except update checks.
- +Deletes the audio once the transcript is written by default — only keeps it if you turn that setting on.
- +Markdown output with timestamped speaker lines is built to be handed straight to a coding agent.
Mind the limits
- −Needs macOS 26 — it won't run on older Macs.
- −Nobody on the call is notified it's recording — the site says telling them is on you, not the app.
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