Transcribe counseling, coaching and supervision sessions – without a word leaving your Mac

Anyone who counsels, coaches or supervises knows the dilemma: take notes and be half absent – or stay fully in the conversation and reconstruct it from memory afterwards. A transcript solves that. Cloud services, however, are hardly an option for confidential conversations. Local Transcriber therefore transcribes entirely on your own Mac.

Why local instead of cloud

No third party gets the conversations. Speech recognition (Whisper) and speaker recognition (pyannote) run on the Mac. No service provider processes recordings – responsibility for recording and retention stays with you.
No bot in the call. In online sessions, no “notetaker” joins as an extra participant. The app records the microphone and system audio on your own Mac – on two separate tracks, so your voice and your client's are kept apart cleanly.
No internet needed. After installation, everything works offline. No account, no subscription.

How a session works

Get consent – before recording, from everyone involved. The app deliberately makes no automatic announcement; you have that conversation yourself.
Record – one click in the menu bar. With Zoom, Teams, Google Meet & co., the app detects the call and asks “Record?”. It never starts on its own.
Wait for the transcript – one hour of conversation is transcribed in about three to four minutes, with timestamps and speakers, as a Markdown file next to the recording.
Name speakers – or deliberately don't. The app separates voices automatically (A, B, …). It recognizes named voices in later sessions.
Keep working – mark key passages, pull quotes for documentation, case review or supervision.

For your own notes in between there is dictation: hold the right ⌘, speak, release – the text appears at the cursor in any app.

What to watch out for with confidential conversations

Voice profiles are biometric data. When you name a voice, the app stores a voice profile – locally, but it remains a biometric identifier. Name clients only with their explicit consent, or leave them as “Speaker B”. Voice profiles can be deleted at any time in the “Voices” window.
Decide on retention. Recordings and transcripts are ordinary files in the folder ~/Transcriber. You decide how long they stay – for example, delete the audio right after transcribing.
Protect the Mac. Turn on FileVault, use a screen lock, encrypt backups: local is only as safe as the device.
Mind your professional rules. Whether and how you may record is governed by your professional code and the law of your country. The tool doesn't make that judgment for you.

What works well – and the limits

Works well: clear German and English, even in long conversations; online sessions thanks to the separate tracks; recurring voices once they are named.

Limits: several people in one room on one microphone – short interjections are sometimes attributed to the wrong speaker; uncertain assignments are marked “(?)”. Dialects and quiet or overlapping voices reduce accuracy. A transcript doesn't replace listening; it's a memory aid.

Try it

Local Transcriber is free and open source (MIT). Requirements: a Mac with Apple Silicon (M1 or newer), macOS 14 or newer, about 8 GB of free disk space. Open Terminal (⌘ + Space, “Terminal”) and paste:

curl -fsSL https://transcriber.teconomix.net/k/seo-counseling/install.sh | bash

Step-by-step guide with pictures and a 70-second video: home page. Questions: GitHub Discussions.