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ScribeKit

ScribeKit is a native macOS app for background-first meeting transcription. It captures audio from the applications you select, transcribes it on your Mac, and writes a timestamped Markdown transcript into a folder you chose.

Nothing leaves the machine. There are no accounts, no cloud database, no telemetry and no analytics, and the app ships without the network client entitlement, so the sandbox does not permit it to open a network connection at all.

Status: v0.1.0 — source release

ScribeKit's first release is v0.1.0. Audio capture from selected applications, live on-device transcription, durable Markdown transcripts, pause and resume, crash recovery, optional audio retention, background operation with a menu bar item, transcript history and search, uncertainty review with playback, local meeting notes and diagnostic export all work end to end.

There is no prebuilt signed or notarized download. v0.1.0 is published as source and is built from source. See Releases for why, and Limitations for what is not built.

What it does

  • Captures the apps you pick. Audio comes from the applications you select through ScreenCaptureKit, not from the whole system and not from a microphone. See Capturing App Audio.

  • Transcribes on this Mac. Apple's SpeechAnalyzer and SpeechTranscriber against a language model installed locally. There is no network fallback. See On-device Speech.

  • Writes Markdown you own. transcript.md is appended to as speech is finalised and is readable in any editor while the meeting is still running. See Transcript Format.

  • Keeps running behind the window. The meeting belongs to the application, not the window. Closing the window keeps capturing and releases the interface. See Background Operation.

What it will not do

  • It will not rewrite your transcript. Recognised speech is source material: no AI cleanup, no summarisation, no grammar correction, no inferred substitutions. Notes and reviewed marks are derived artifacts kept in a separate file that cannot reach the transcript.
  • It will not hide the fact that it is recording. Capture is always visible.
  • It will not claim a meeting finished when it did not. A capture stream that dies under a meeting is recorded as an interruption, not as a completion.
  • It will not pretend to be more certain than the recogniser was. Passages the recogniser was unsure about, and audio that was never transcribed, are surfaced rather than smoothed over.

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