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Show HN: Trace – Offline Mac meeting transcripts you can flag mid-call

Trace, a new macOS app, provides on-device meeting transcription and flagging without cloud uploads, requiring no accounts or servers. It captures microphone and system audio, transcribes locally on Apple silicon, and allows users to flag moments mid-call with keystrokes, generating markdown transcripts for integration with tools like Notion or ChatGPT.

read3 min publishedJun 13, 2026

On-device only

A local speech model, running on-device. No servers, no accounts, and nothing you record ever leaves your Mac.

Trace captures your microphone and system audio, transcribes locally on your Mac, and hands you a markdown transcript with flagged moments inline.

No accounts. No cloud. No meeting bots.

Requires macOS 14 or later and Apple silicon.

One keystroke brings Trace up over any application: Zoom, Teams, Meet, Slack, anything. No app to open, no window to place.

Hit ⌘K mid-call, type a short note, hit Enter. The moment lands in your transcript at the exact timestamp. You stay in the meeting, and any AI reading the transcript later sees exactly what mattered.

Catch up without leaving the flow Press ⌘? and the pill grows upward into a live transcript of the last two minutes, interleaved with every key moment you flagged. Runs entirely on-device, same as the final transcript. No uploads, no audio sent anywhere.

Into Notion or Obsidian for the vault. Into ChatGPT, Claude, or the AI of your choice if you want it summarised. Trace hands you clean, contextual markdown for whatever comes next.

The menu bar keeps a quiet list of your sessions. Copy, reveal in Finder, or re-open without switching apps.

A local speech model, running on-device. No servers, no accounts, and nothing you record ever leaves your Mac.

Transcribes meetings in seconds on Apple silicon. No upload, no queue, no spinner while a cloud catches up.

Record, flag, recap, , hide. Every action has a shortcut. Remap any of them to match your muscle memory.

Every session lives in Finder as plain audio and markdown. Move them into your vault, version them in git, or delete them. They're yours.

Hit ⌘K mid-recording to mark a moment. Add a note while the conversation keeps going. Key moments land inline in the transcript exactly where they happened, so you can scan to them in one pass.

Connect your calendar and every recording picks up the event title automatically. A quiet reminder appears one minute before the meeting starts, offering to record. Use your Mac's calendar, on-device and covering any account, or link Google directly. Opt-in, read-only, off by default.

Trace identifies who's speaking on the call and gives every participant a unique identifier.

No servers, API keys, accounts or telemetry. Your audio and your transcripts never touch a machine that isn't yours.

macOS asks for System Audio Recording permission so Trace can capture audio from your other apps. Trace never accesses your screen.

What you get

Key moments that you flag land inline, right where they happened. Your future self, your teammates, and your AI of choice can scan straight to what mattered.

Compare

Honest, on-device comparisons for the people who do not want a bot in the call or their audio in the cloud.

Record on your Mac with no bot in the call, transcribed on-device.

Read more →Everything stays on your machine, and it works with the network off.

Read more →The same record-the-meeting simplicity, without the cloud notebook.

Read more →Capture system audio with no extra participant in Zoom, Meet or Teams.

Read more →No accounts, no cloud, no telemetry.

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