QuickQuill

QuickQuill transcribes the whole conversation on your Mac and writes a summary in the background the moment you stop, using Apple's on-device frameworks. That means no audio or text ever hits a server, but it also means the writing-up quality is tied to Apple's models rather than a hosted frontier model. For most meetings, the summary lands close enough to work from directly.

The app works as a private meeting recorder that captures your voice and the other side of the call together, in order, straight from your Mac's audio. There's no bot to invite and no link to paste, so nobody else on the call sees a third party join. If a service blocks third-party recorders, this is the workaround that keeps working.

A floating caption bar shows the conversation as it unfolds, and watching a call or video in another language triggers on-device translation. The captions and the translation both run locally, which is the point: you can read along without shipping the conversation anywhere. Accuracy drops on heavy accents or overlapping speakers, as you'd expect from any local model.

Dictation is a separate, always-free feature. Hold the shortcut, talk, and the text appears wherever your cursor sits, with custom vocabulary to catch names and jargon. It works with any app on the Mac, so it's useful well beyond meetings, and it's the one part of QuickQuill you keep for nothing.

On the paid plan, you can import existing audio and video files and get a transcript without a live recording. Exports cover the formats editors actually ask for: plain text, Markdown, SRT, VTT, and subtitled video. That last one is handy if you publish recordings and need captions baked in.

Sessions are saved locally so you can search them later, and you control how long they stick around. Set a retention period in Settings and older sessions clear out on their own. Delete any session and it's gone, since there's no backup copy sitting on someone else's disk.