trnscrb

trnscrb is a privacy-focused meeting transcription tool for macOS that runs entirely on your local machine. It sits in your menu bar, automatically detects when you're in a meeting, and transcribes audio using OpenAI's Whisper model running on Apple Silicon Metal—no cloud processing or internet connection required. Every transcript is saved as plain text and instantly searchable from Claude Desktop via MCP integration.

• Auto-detection automatically recognizes when you're in a meeting by detecting mic activity combined with Google Meet, Zoom, Slack Huddle, Microsoft Teams, or FaceTime running on your system.

• Local recording captures your microphone audio, or both mic and system audio using the BlackHole virtual driver to record all meeting participants.

• On-device transcription uses the Whisper small model with Apple Silicon Metal acceleration for fast, private transcription without sending data to the cloud.

• Claude Desktop integration provides MCP tools for controlling recordings and searching transcripts directly from Claude, enabling natural language queries about your meeting history.

• Speaker diarization optionally labels different speakers (SPEAKER_00, SPEAKER_01) when connected to a free HuggingFace account.

• Plain text storage saves all transcripts as .txt files in ~/meeting-notes/, ensuring you own your data with no proprietary formats or databases.

• Transcript enrichment optionally sends transcript text to Claude API to generate summaries and action items via the trnscrb enrich command.

To get started, install via Homebrew with brew tap ajayrmk/tap && brew install trnscrb && trnscrb install. The install command handles BlackHole setup, HuggingFace token configuration, Whisper model download, Claude Desktop MCP config, and launch-at-login. Alternatively, install via pip or uv with pip install trnscrb && trnscrb install. The tool works on Intel Macs but Apple Silicon is recommended for Metal-accelerated transcription performance.