Show HN: Biscotti – on-device meeting transcription for macOS
I got tired of Electron meeting-transcription apps that upload my private audio to a server to do transcription/summary my MacBook could do locally in seconds. So I built Biscotti: a free, local meeting recorder. Calendar integration, voice isolation, speaker ID, AI summaries, native UI — and nothing ever leaves your device.
It's completely private: all AI runs locally, all data stored locally, nothing leaves your device, no cloud. It's native macOS (SwiftUI, not Electron), so it's smaller, faster, and more intuitive. And no bot ever joins your call - it uses system audio APIs, so it works with every app.
It integrates deeply with your Mac. It watches for meetings via audio APIs and offers to record when one starts, then automatically stops when the meeting ends (cancelable). It reads your calendar to see upcoming meetings, offers to start recording when they begin, and uses that metadata to help identify speakers. Speaker ID combines diarization, calendar metadata, and the transcript to figure out who's who automatically. Voice isolation separates your mic from your speaker output for clean audio.
The AI is customizable: want it to generate action items? A Slack-style summary? Talk like a pirate? Just edit the summary prompt. There's also markdown notes, and it keeps compressed audio files so you can re-transcribe later.
It's completely free. Under the PolyForm Perimeter License — fairly permissive (but not OSI open source).
Models and SDKs:
Transcription — Whisper Large V3 Turbo via WhisperKit
Summarization — Gemma 4 via llama.cpp (12B or E2B depending on your memory/processor)
Speaker ID (diarization) — Pyannote via SpeakerKit
Swift and SwiftUI
XPC services for all AI processing, so the app stays tiny and stable and AI memory releases immediately
System APIs: CoreAudio for audio, EventKit for calendars