This page is designed to help you find out whether TinyScribe is good and if it is the right choice for you.
TinyScribe is a privacy-focused meeting notetaker. The Mac app takes notes in your meetings without you having to start it every time. TinyScribe is a menu bar app. It records calls in all meeting tools such as Zoom, Teams, Meet, Slack and FaceTime, and in the browser, automatically. No bot joins the meeting.
TinyScribe transcribes with Apple's SpeechAnalyzer locally on your Mac. Summaries are created with Apple Intelligence Private Cloud Compute. Your audio never leaves your Mac, and the transcript is never sent to any third-party AI. No API key, no model download.
Recording starts and stops automatically, or manually with one click. A red dot in the menu bar shows for as long as a recording runs. Microphone and system audio are kept apart in the transcript, and individual apps can be excluded from automatic recording.
Transcripts and summaries become context for your AI: TinyScribe ships an MCP server, so Claude and Claude Code can reach your meetings directly. Meetings go into the index for Siri and Spotlight, any transcript or summary can be copied as Markdown with one click, and everything exports as Markdown, PDF, rich text or audio.
TinyScribe talks to no external server other than your own iCloud. No account, no training on your data. Audio stays on your Mac and can be deleted automatically after a period you choose.
TinyScribe is written in Swift and SwiftUI and is under 10 MB. The download is free, the app can be tried for 30 meetings, then a one-time purchase is required. The app requires macOS 27 and Apple silicon. Summaries need Apple Intelligence and an internet connection. The app also works within the EU.
Listed in
On-device transcription
Calls are transcribed on your Mac with Apple's speech engine. Audio never leaves your device, and transcription works offline.
No bot in your calls
TinyScribe listens through the Mac's audio, so no bot joins the meeting and nobody sees a recording attendee. Works with Zoom, Teams, Meet, Slack, FaceTime and any browser call.
Automatic meeting detection
Recording starts and stops on its own when a call begins and ends. A red dot in the menu bar shows while it runs; auto-recording can be switched off per app or entirely.
Summaries with Apple Intelligence
Topics, decisions and action items are generated through Apple's Private Cloud Compute. Apple stores nothing and does not train on your meetings; no server of ours is involved.
One-time purchase, no account
30 meetings free, then a single Mac App Store purchase unlocks the app for good. No subscription, no sign-up, no email. Transcripts and summaries sync through your own iCloud.
Most notetakers make you choose: either a bot in the call and your audio on someone's server (Otter, Fireflies, tl;dv), or a bot-free app that still processes everything in the cloud and charges monthly (Granola, Jamie). TinyScribe does neither. Transcription happens on your Mac, summaries go through Apple's Private Cloud Compute, and you pay once. Compared with local tools like MacWhisper, you get automatic meeting detection, summaries and iCloud sync without downloading models or managing files. If you work on Windows, need team features or want a shared workspace, one of the others is the better fit. TinyScribe is built for your own notes, on your own Mac.
TinyScribe is a meeting notetaker for Mac that keeps your conversations on your Mac.
Digital creatives and knowledge workers on a Mac who spend their day in client calls, briefings and feedback rounds: freelancers, designers, developers, consultants, founders. People who want to stay in the conversation instead of typing, who care where their recordings end up, and who are done with another subscription. A common pattern: paste the transcript into the AI of your choice and use it as context for the next task.
I'm Michael, an app developer for fifteen years. For most of that time my meeting notes were half sentences in whatever editor happened to be open. When AI arrived, I had the same idea as many others: record, transcribe, summarize. But I wanted it a specific way: no subscription, no pasting API keys, no transcription in somebody else's cloud, no downloading models onto the Mac. With macOS 27 that finally became possible: Apple's reworked speech framework handles long meetings, and Apple Intelligence Private Cloud Compute has a context window large enough for a 90-minute call. The notetakers I tried were either too technical or ran everything on a server, and most wanted a monthly fee. So I built the one I had pictured. TinyScribe is the app I open every workday, and we use it daily at Appdafür, the app studio in Munich I co-founded thirteen years ago.
We have collected here some useful links to help you find out if TinyScribe is good.
Check the traffic stats of TinyScribe on SimilarWeb. The key metrics to look for are: monthly visits, average visit duration, pages per visit, and traffic by country. Moreoever, check the traffic sources. For example "Direct" traffic is a good sign.
Check the "Domain Rating" of TinyScribe on Ahrefs. The domain rating is a measure of the strength of a website's backlink profile on a scale from 0 to 100. It shows the strength of TinyScribe's backlink profile compared to the other websites. In most cases a domain rating of 60+ is considered good and 70+ is considered very good.
Check the "Domain Authority" of TinyScribe on MOZ. A website's domain authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score that predicts how well a website will rank on search engine result pages (SERPs). It is based on a 100-point logarithmic scale, with higher scores corresponding to a greater likelihood of ranking. This is another useful metric to check if a website is good.
The latest comments about TinyScribe on Reddit. This can help you find out how popualr the product is and what people think about it.
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