trnscrb

Offline meeting transcription for macOS — no cloud, no subscription.

trnscrb lives in your menu bar, listens for meetings, transcribes them locally with Whisper, and makes every transcript searchable from Claude Desktop via MCP.

Install

brew tap ajayrmk/tap
brew install trnscrb
trnscrb install

Or with pip / uv:

pip install trnscrb && trnscrb install
uv tool install trnscrb && trnscrb install

trnscrb install is a guided setup that handles:

BlackHole 2ch audio driver (captures system audio alongside mic)
HuggingFace token for speaker diarization (pyannote)
Whisper small model download (~500 MB, one-time)
Claude Desktop MCP config
Launch-at-login agent

Quick start

trnscrb start       # launch the menu bar app

With Auto-transcribe on (the default), trnscrb detects when a meeting starts — Google Meet, Zoom, Slack Huddle, Teams, FaceTime — and begins recording automatically. When the meeting ends, it stops, transcribes, and saves.

You can also trigger manually from the menu bar: Start Transcribing / Stop Transcribing.

How it works

| Step | What happens | |---|---| | Meeting detected | Mic active for 5 s + meeting app found | | Recording | Audio captured via mic or BlackHole (system + mic) | | Transcription | Whisper small model, runs locally on Apple Silicon | | Diarization | Speaker labels via pyannote (needs HuggingFace token) | | Saved | Plain .txt in ~/meeting-notes/ |

Claude Desktop integration

After trnscrb install, Claude Desktop has these tools available:

| Tool | Description | |---|---| | start_recording | Start capturing audio | | stop_recording | Stop and transcribe in the background | | recording_status | Check if recording or transcribing | | get_last_transcript | Fetch the most recent transcript | | list_transcripts | List all saved meetings | | get_transcript | Read a specific transcript | | get_calendar_context | Current or upcoming calendar event | | enrich_transcript | Add summary + action items via Claude API |

CLI

trnscrb start               # launch menu bar app
trnscrb install             # guided setup / re-check dependencies
trnscrb list                # list saved transcripts
trnscrb show <id>           # print a transcript
trnscrb enrich <id>         # summarise + action items (needs ANTHROPIC_API_KEY)
trnscrb mic-status          # live mic activity monitor — useful for debugging
trnscrb devices             # list audio input devices
trnscrb watch               # headless auto-transcribe, no menu bar

System audio with BlackHole

To capture both your mic and the other participants' audio:

Install BlackHole via trnscrb install (or brew install blackhole-2ch)
Open Audio MIDI Setup → + → Create Multi-Output Device
Check BlackHole 2ch and MacBook Pro Speakers
System Settings → Sound → Output → select the Multi-Output Device

trnscrb auto-detects BlackHole and uses it when available. Without it, only your mic is recorded.

Transcript format

Meeting: Weekly Standup
Date:    2025-02-18 10:00
Duration:23:14

============================================================

[SPEAKER_00]
  00:12  Good morning, let's get started.

[SPEAKER_01]
  00:18  Morning! I finished the auth PR yesterday.

Running trnscrb enrich <id> replaces SPEAKER_00 / SPEAKER_01 with inferred names and appends a summary and action items block.

Requirements

macOS 13 or later
Python 3.11+
Apple Silicon (M1/M2/M3/M4) recommended — Whisper runs on Metal

Privacy

Everything runs on your machine. No audio or transcripts leave your device unless you explicitly run enrich, which sends the transcript text to the Claude API.

License

MIT

Trnscrb

Install / Use

README