Quill

Quill is a minimal, fully local macOS meeting recorder and transcriber that lives in your menu bar. One click records your microphone and all system audio as two separate tracks; when you stop, Quill transcribes both on-device and writes a speaker-tagged transcript. Nothing ever leaves your machine.

Key Features

• One menu-bar click to record — Start capturing mic and system audio instantly from the menu bar
• Dual-track recording — Records your mic and system audio as separate tracks for clean transcription
• On-device transcription — Uses Parakeet (English) via FluidAudio's Core ML port, running entirely offline
• Speaker-tagged transcripts — Mic vs. system audio provides free two-party diarization without a speaker-identification model
• Privacy-first — All processing happens locally; no data leaves your Mac
• CAF format — Resilient format that preserves already-written audio even if the process crashes mid-meeting
• Launch at login — Optional background daemon with quill install --launch-at-login

Output Files

Each session is saved to ~/Recordings/<yyyy.MM.dd-HHmm>/:

• mic.caf — Your side (default input device, AAC)
• system.caf — Everything the Mac played (AAC)
• meta.json — Start/end timestamps, duration, per-track start offsets
• transcript.json — Canonical transcript with timed, speaker-tagged segments
• transcript.md — Human-readable rendered transcript

Requirements

• macOS 15+ (Core Audio process taps for system audio)
• Apple Silicon recommended for transcription speed
• ~600 MB model download on first transcription

Stack

• Swift binary with no app bundle
• Menu-bar tray UI (no Dock icon)
• Core Audio process taps (no virtual device, no kernel extension)
• FluidAudio Parakeet Core ML for transcription