Yawn 0.4.0 — internal alpha. It records, transcribes, and can now mark speech that is not yours. It does not write your notes yet.

YAWN

Nothing leaves your Mac.Nothing gets papered over.

Yawn records your meeting, transcribes it locally with Whisper, and keeps the transcript as evidence — so you can always read the words behind what it tells you, and see where it heard nothing at all.

The commercial notetakers all send your meeting audio to someone else's computer to be transcribed — Granola, Circleback, and Fireflies even in its no-bot mode. "Not retained" is a deletion policy, not a promise it never left. Yawn has no server to send it to.

Download for macOS Read the limits first
Audio leaving this Mac
NeverNo server exists to send it to.
Account required
NoneNothing to sign into, nothing phoning home.
Automatic notes
Not yetTwo models tested, neither admitted.
Speaker names
NeverAudio knows you and not-you, not who.
How a meeting becomes a transcript

Four steps, all of them on your machine.

  1. 01 / Start

    You press record.

    No bot joins the call and no calendar is scanned. Nothing starts without you.

    Manual start, manual stop
  2. 02 / Capture

    Two streams, kept apart.

    Your microphone and the meeting audio your Mac plays are recorded separately, so who-said-what survives without guessing.

    You and them, never merged
  3. 03 / Transcribe

    Whisper runs here, after the call.

    The model ships inside the app. That is why the download is large and why there is no account to create.

    Nothing uploaded, no account
  4. 04 / Read

    Search every word it caught.

    The transcript is the artifact that is kept. Audio has a stated lifetime and is deleted on schedule, with a receipt.

    Evidence outlives the audio
Scope

What it does, and what it refuses to pretend.

Working today

  • Records your microphone plus the meeting audio your Mac plays, on your say-so.
  • Transcribes locally after the meeting, then lets you search every word.
  • Recovers the recording on next launch if the app or your Mac dies mid-meeting.
  • Deletes recorded audio on a schedule you pick per meeting — 1, 7, or 30 days, with nothing chosen for you — and proves the deletion happened.
  • Guided voice setup: record two short sessions and a comparison sample, review the measured options, and Yawn builds a voice profile that stays on this Mac.
  • Once that profile exists, marks the speech on your microphone that does not sound like you. A marked turn is withheld, never deleted — it keeps its place in the transcript, and you can restore it from Meetings.

Deliberately not here

  • No automatic notes. Two candidate models were put through a registered experiment and neither was admitted. Notes ship when they can cite their own evidence, not before.
  • No speaker names. Names come from a meeting's participant list, which means a bot or a browser extension. Yawn reads audio, so it knows you and not-you — never "Brian said".
  • No cloud, account, or telemetry. There is nothing to sign into and nothing phoning home, including when it crashes.
  • No auto-update. New builds arrive as new downloads.
Trust

The claims on this page, and how you can check them.

Every line below is verifiable from your own machine — that is the point of shipping it this way.

Where audio lives
Inside this app's private data folder on your Mac, and nowhere else. It is never copied to a server, because there is no server.
Network behavior
None during capture, transcription, or note reading. The Whisper model is bundled, so nothing is downloaded at runtime.
How complete a transcript is
Not fully. On a real meeting played through speakers, this project measured recall at 30.7% of spoken words. That number is published rather than hidden, because a tool whose transcript is partial lives or dies on telling you so.
How reliable the voice check is
Unmeasured on a real meeting. The threshold that decides "not you" was set from your own setup recordings, and nothing has scored it against meeting audio yet. So Yawn says that on every transcript it checks, marks rather than deletes, and raises a separate alert when the speech it withholds keeps coming back as one voice. The failure worth guarding against is not a mangled word — it is a colleague near your laptop being cut out of a record nobody can make again.
Deletion
You choose 1, 7, or 30 days before recording starts; there is no default and no way to skip the question. Deletion runs while the app is open — if the deadline passes while it is closed, it runs at the next launch — and writes a content-free receipt naming what it removed. The transcript survives; the ability to re-listen does not.
Signing
Signed with a Developer ID, notarized by Apple, and stapled. The checksum below is printed by the release pipeline, never typed by hand.
Download

One file, one checksum, drag to Applications.

Download Yawn 0.4.0

Apple silicon · macOS 14.4 or later · 1.7 GB · signed, notarized, stapled

The size is the Whisper model travelling with the app. That is the feature, not an oversight.

SHA-256
3634049ed5f8eb80f773db6b8a970a515a091640102ede628b9c6f1bf459b22d

Upgrading from 0.3.x? Drag the new one in over the old; your meetings, settings, and voice profile are kept. Coming from 0.2.x, the app installs as Yawn rather than "Local Meeting Notes" — same app, renamed — so drag the new one in and drag the old one to the Trash.

Install

Verify it before you open it.

  1. Check the file you downloaded matches the checksum above: 
    shasum -a 256 ~/Downloads/Yawn-0.4.0-macos-arm64.dmg
  2. Open the DMG and drag Yawn into Applications, then launch it from Applications.
  3. macOS will ask for Microphone and System Audio Recording on first use. Both are required to capture a meeting — one is your voice, the other is theirs.

If macOS refuses to open the app or shows anything unusual at first launch, report exactly what it said. That is the most valuable bug you can file right now.

The honest part

This records other people. Act like it.

Tell the room before you press record, and when in doubt, ask — around a dozen US states require everyone's consent, not just yours. Use headphones in remote meetings so their voice does not bleed into your microphone and blur who said what.

The voice check is the part that can affect someone who is not you. Switch it on and it marks the speech on your microphone that does not match your profile — including, sometimes, a colleague sitting near your laptop. The threshold behind that call was measured on your own setup recordings and never on a meeting, so nobody knows how often it is wrong. It withholds rather than deletes, keeps the turn in place, and raises a separate alert when the withheld speech keeps returning as one voice. Read that alert as a person and restore anything that belongs. Nobody has run this on a real meeting yet; you would be the first.

When you report a bug, tell us what happened and never what was said. Nothing you record can leave your machine, and we hold ourselves to that in testing too.