quill
Records mic and system audio locally as two tracks, transcribes both on-device.
quill sits in the menu bar, and one click records your microphone and all system audio as two separate CAF tracks — free two-party diarization without a speaker-ID model, since it's just you versus everyone else on the call. On stop, it transcribes both tracks on-device with Parakeet TDT 0.6B v2 (about 20 seconds per hour of audio on Apple Silicon), merges them by timestamp into a speaker-tagged transcript, and writes everything to ~/Recordings/ — nothing ever leaves the machine.
What holds up
- +Fully local — recording and transcription never leave the machine, no cloud upload
- +Two-track recording gives free me-vs-them diarization without a speaker-identification model
- +CAF format needs no finalization pass — a crash mid-meeting still leaves a readable file
Mind the limits
- −Requires macOS 15+, and Apple Silicon is recommended — Intel Macs are second-class here
- −Default transcription is English-only; the Whisper fallback for other languages is only planned
Featured here? Take the badge
Put it on your site — it links back to this review. Free for every listed product, always.
<a href="https://stillworks.dev/products/p/quill/"><img src="https://stillworks.dev/badge/quill.svg" alt="Picked by StillWorks" width="250" height="54"></a>