QuickQuill

Private, on-device meeting notes for Mac

Mac

Meetings

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on-device is the right call for meeting notes specifically, that's exactly the kind of content people would never send to a cloud API if they stopped to think about it. how's battery/CPU usage during a long call, is it light enough to run in the background through a 2 hour meeting without you noticing the fan spin up

Wi-Fi-off is convincing. The ugly leak is usually after the meeting: Spotlight indexing, Time Machine, cloud-synced folders, crash logs. Where does QuickQuill store raw audio, and is it encrypted or deleted before any of those can see it?

@taisei_ide Voted for this. Privacy-first products need the first email to reinforce trust, not just features, curious how that's framed.

Taisei, keeping private conversations on my own machine is exactly the kind of thing I have wished for. Trust matters a lot to me here, and knowing nothing quietly wanders off elsewhere makes me far more relaxed about it.

The "nothing joins the participant list because nothing joins the call" framing is the actual selling point for me — capturing system audio and mic locally instead of inviting a bot is the right privacy boundary. Two implementation things: for the both-sides capture, are you tapping system audio via Core Audio / a virtual device, and does that need a permission the user has to re-grant after macOS updates? And is transcription running fully on-device, or does the summary step call out to an API?

the mic + system-audio merge has one seam — on speaker with no headphones, the remote voice plays out your speakers and back into your mic, so the same line lands in both streams. timestamp merge then double-logs it, or tags the other side as "you".

Runs offline and still pulls off live translation mid-meeting, which genuinely surprised me. The no-account, one-time-purchase setup is a nice change from the usual subscription grind.

on-device is genuinely the only trust model that survives contact with real work conversations, that part's not even debatable anymore. the speaker separation question that hasn't come up yet: for a video call it's easy since you already know which audio stream is "you" vs "the call," but what about an in-person meeting where several people are talking into one Mac mic? is diarization from a single mixed audio source good enough to reliably tell people apart in the transcript, or does that mode work better as one undifferentiated transcript

The local-only approach is genuinely refreshing and the push-to-talk dictation across apps is the kind of simple utility I wish came built into macOS already. One thing that would make this a daily driver for me is a way to search across all past transcripts from a global hotkey, so I can jump straight to the moment someone mentioned a specific decision or action item without opening individual files.

The Wi-Fi-off demo is the right kind of proof, and the no-account / one-time-price call is one I really respect — we build free, no-signup tools in a different corner (consumer fraud) for the same reason: the moment you gate the thing behind an account, you've asked the user to trust you to be exactly what you're protecting them from.

One thing I keep turning over, from the other side of the table: with a cloud bot, everyone at least sees it sitting in the participant list — an ugly but honest "you're being recorded" signal. QuickQuill's best feature is that nothing joins the call, which also means the other people lose the one cue that told them. Do you think about that side at all — anything that surfaces "this is being captured" to the room, or is that squarely the recorder's call to make?

runs fully offline and still nails live translation while recording, pretty rare combo for a mac app. the no bot joining the call thing is a nice touch too.

Ran the demo video with Wi-Fi off and it actually worked, which is a nice change from apps that quietly phone home. The live subtitle translation while recording is the kind of feature I didn't know I wanted until now.

"Nothing appears in the participant list because nothing joins the call" is the line that sells it for me — a bot sitting in the roster is a nonstarter for anything sensitive, and Wi-Fi-off recording proves the point better than any privacy policy. Two genuine questions: on a long, rambly meeting, how does the on-device summary hold up against the cloud notetakers, and which model is doing that work locally? And can I export the transcript plus summary as plain markdown? I live in Obsidian, so an export path matters more to me than an in-app archive.

recording the demo with wifi off is the whole pitch in one move. on-device is the only trust model that makes sense once real business talk is in the room

Congrats on the launch, @QuickQuill @taisei_ide ! The "bot fatigue" in modern meetings is incredibly real, and relying on cloud infrastructure for private conversations is a massive friction point for most operators.

From an engineering standpoint, grabbing system audio without forcing users to install clunky virtual audio drivers (like BlackHole) is a huge usability win. Since you are utilizing the new macOS 26 capabilities, I’m curious if QuickQuill relies on Apple's native SpeechAnalyzer framework for the local transcription and voice activity detection, or if you had to package a custom local model (like Whisper) directly into the app bundle to support the offline translations?

Recording the demo with Wi-Fi completely disabled is the ultimate flex. Great work!

Recording the demo with Wi-Fi turned off is probably the best possible proof for this product :) I have never really liked meeting bots sitting in the participant list either, especially when the conversation may include private product or business details. keeping the recording, transcription, translation, and summary entirely on the Mac feels like the right trust model.

The one-time price is refreshing too. Curious how QuickQuill reliably captures both sides of a call across different apps without installing a virtual audio driver, and how well speaker separation works when several people are talking?