Transcripted

Transcripted is a local Mac app for dictation and meeting capture that turns spoken words into structured files your agent can actually use.

Use it today as a practical dictation and meeting tool. Longer term, I think audio is the first useful layer of AI context, because it captures without asking you to maintain a second brain by hand.

What You Get Today

• Dictate into any app and paste text back
• Record meetings locally
• Save human-readable Markdown and agent-readable JSON files on disk
• Point Claude, Codex, OpenClaw or any agent at those files

Why This Exists

A lot of important context never makes it into your notes/docs.

Important context gets lost in:

• a call where a decision was made
• thinking out loud through a hard problem

Most of that context disappears as soon as the conversation ends.

Transcripted preserves that high signal context, then turns it into files that stay on device.

How It Works

1. Capture spoken work

Transcripted supports two concrete workflows today:

• dictation into any app
• meeting recording and transcription

2. Process it locally

Transcripted transcribes audio on-device and keeps the resulting files on your Mac.

3. Save Files

Meeting recordings become:

• a Markdown transcript
• a structured JSON sidecar
• a transcripted.json index of saved meetings

Dictation becomes:

• daily Markdown logs like Dictations_2026-04-07.md
• timestamped sections with source-app metadata and delivery status

4. Load the right slice later

Instead of asking an agent to read everything all the time, Transcripted gives you durable files that can be loaded when needed:

• latest meeting
• meetings for a named speaker
• dictations from a specific day
• transcripts related to a topic or decision

Artifacts, Not A Black Box

Transcripted is opinionated about file output because inspectable artifacts are more useful than opaque app state.

Example meeting transcript:

# Meeting with Alex

## Full Transcript

**[00:00] [Mic/You]**
Thanks for making time today.

**[00:04] [System/Alex]**
Happy to help. Let's get started.

Example meeting sidecar:

{
  "version": "1.0",
  "recording": {
    "duration_seconds": 750,
    "engines": {
      "stt": "parakeet-tdt-v3",
      "diarization": "pyannote-offline"
    }
  },
  "speakers": [
    { "id": "mic_0", "name": "You" },
    { "id": "system_0", "name": "Alex" }
  ],
  "utterances": [
    { "start": 0.0, "end": 4.0, "speaker_id": "mic_0", "text": "Thanks for making time today." }
  ]
}

Example dictation artifact:

---
title: "Dictations for April 7, 2026"
date: 2026-04-07
capture_type: dictation_day
---

## 9:15 AM - First note from the morning

Source app: Messages
Timestamp: 2026-04-07 09:15:00

first note from the morning

Why Audio First

We do not think the answer is "capture everything."

We think the better path is:

• start with a signal people already produce during real work
• structure it into useful artifacts automatically
• let agents load more context only when they need it

Audio is a good first wedge because it is:

• high signal
• already part of meetings and messaging
• less invasive than full screen capture
• easier to structure than a full visual memory system

That does not make Transcripted an "ambient context layer" yet. It means audio is the first practical layer of one.

Local By Default

Transcripted keeps its core workflows on-device:

• dictation capture and saved dictation logs stay on your Mac
• meeting capture, transcription, and saved transcripts stay on your Mac
• agent-facing artifacts are plain local files you can inspect directly

Default locations on a new install are:

• capture library: ~/Library/Application Support/Transcripted/captures/
• meetings: ~/Library/Application Support/Transcripted/captures/meetings/
• dictations: ~/Library/Application Support/Transcripted/captures/dictations/
• app state, logs, and temp files: ~/Library/Application Support/Transcripted/{state,logs,tmp}/

You can move the capture library in Settings. Transcripted keeps its databases, logs, cache, and temporary recordings under ~/Library/Application Support/Transcripted/ even when captures live somewhere else.

Historic Draft paths remain in the repo for migration/cleanup flows and for standalone tool fallback when older artifacts are the only data on disk.

Operational caveats:

• first launch may download local models from HuggingFace if they are not cached
• signed builds can check Transcripted's Sparkle appcast for in-app updates
• beta builds can optionally contact the update/log proxy for update checks and diagnostics

What Exists Today

Today, Transcripted is already useful as:

• a local dictation tool
• a local meeting recorder and transcription tool
• a file-based handoff point for external agents

The current product is not a full passive memory system. Capture is still explicitly user-invoked. The value is that what you capture becomes durable, structured, and reusable instead of disappearing.

Where This Goes Next

The broader direction is to improve the audio context layer before expanding scope.

That likely means:

• better summarization and extraction from saved artifacts
• more selective retrieval for agents
• stronger cross-meeting speaker and topic navigation
• light non-audio context later, where it clearly improves usefulness

The goal is not to make context gathering feel like a job. The goal is to make useful context accumulate quietly, then make the right slice easy to load.

Build

bash build-deps.sh
bash build.sh

build.sh is the local development path. It expects the unified dependency artifacts from build-deps.sh and then signs the app for stable local permissions on the current machine.

For signed DMG packaging and notarization workflow notes, see docs/release-packaging.md.

Tests

bash run-tests.sh

If you touch meeting integration or TranscriptedCore, also run:

bash run-integration-smoke.sh

Transition Notes

The old standalone Transcripted app is preserved on:

• branch: legacy/transcripted-standalone
• tag: pre-draft-takeover-2026-04-06

This repo currently uses the manual migration path:

• existing standalone Transcripted installs do not auto-upgrade into this app
• current app builds default to Transcripted-named Application Support paths
• captures can be relocated in Settings without moving app state or logs
• standalone tools still recognize older Draft and ~/Documents/Transcripted/ layouts as fallback
• permissions and settings do not carry over automatically

Contributing And Security

• See CONTRIBUTING.md for development setup and architecture notes
• See SECURITY.md for privacy architecture and vulnerability reporting