Show HN: Trace – Offline Mac meeting transcripts you can flag mid-call
Meeting transcripts that never leave your Mac.
Meeting transcripts that never leave your Mac.
Trace captures your microphone and system audio, transcribes locally on your Mac, and hands you a markdown transcript with flagged moments inline.
No accounts. No cloud. No meeting bots.
Requires macOS 14 or later and Apple silicon.
Out of the way until you need it.
One keystroke brings Trace up over any application: Zoom, Teams, Meet, Slack, anything. No app to open, no window to place.
Mark the moment. Keep talking.
Hit âK mid-call, type a short note, hit Enter. The moment lands in your transcript at the exact timestamp. You stay in the meeting, and any AI reading the transcript later sees exactly what mattered.
Catch up without leaving the flow
Missed something? Peek at the last few minutes.
Press â? and the pill grows upward into a live transcript of the last two minutes, interleaved with every key moment you flagged. Runs entirely on-device, same as the final transcript. No uploads, no audio sent anywhere.
Markdown you can paste anywhere.
Into Notion or Obsidian for the vault. Into ChatGPT, Claude, or the AI of your choice if you want it summarised. Trace hands you clean, contextual markdown for whatever comes next.
Every transcript, one click away.
The menu bar keeps a quiet list of your sessions. Copy, reveal in Finder, or re-open without switching apps.
Fast. Private. Out of your way.
On-device only
A local speech model, running on-device. No servers, no accounts, and nothing you record ever leaves your Mac.
Seconds, not minutes
Transcribes meetings in seconds on Apple silicon. No upload, no queue, no spinner while a cloud catches up.
- âRRecord
- âKKey moment
- â?Recap
- âPPause
- âHHide pill
Keyboard-driven
Record, flag, recap, pause, hide. Every action has a shortcut. Remap any of them to match your muscle memory.
- mic.wav1.2 MB
- system.wav1.5 MB
- transcript.md4 KB
- transcript.json12 KB
- meta.json1 KB
Yours, locally
Every session lives in Finder as plain audio and markdown. Move them into your vault, version them in git, or delete them. They're yours.
Flag what matters, live.
Hit âK mid-recording to mark a moment. Add a note while the conversation keeps going. Key moments land inline in the transcript exactly where they happened, so you can scan to them in one pass.
Meeting-aware.
Connect your calendar and every recording picks up the event title automatically. A quiet reminder appears one minute before the meeting starts, offering to record. Use your Mac's calendar, on-device and covering any account, or link Google directly. Opt-in, read-only, off by default.
Speaker-aware.
Trace identifies who's speaking on the call and gives every participant a unique identifier.
Not another cloud tool.
No servers, API keys, accounts or telemetry. Your audio and your transcripts never touch a machine that isn't yours.
macOS asks for System Audio Recording permission so Trace can capture audio from your other apps. Trace never accesses your screen.
What you get
A clean, formatted transcript
Key moments that you flag land inline, right where they happened. Your future self, your teammates, and your AI of choice can scan straight to what mattered.
Compare
See how Trace stacks up.
Honest, on-device comparisons for the people who do not want a bot in the call or their audio in the cloud.
Otter alternative
Record on your Mac with no bot in the call, transcribed on-device.
Read more âOffline transcription for Mac
Everything stays on your machine, and it works with the network off.
Read more âGranola alternative
The same record-the-meeting simplicity, without the cloud notebook.
Read more âNo-bot transcription
Capture system audio with no extra participant in Zoom, Meet or Teams.
Read more âStart capturing.
No accounts, no cloud, no telemetry.
Source: hackernews