Amanu

Records and transcribes online meetings. Automatically.

Amanu is a free, open-source meeting recorder for macOS. It works with Zoom, Google Meet, Telegram, WhatsApp, and other call apps without sending a bot into the meeting. It starts and stops recording on its own, separates speakers, writes a detailed summary, and keeps the complete record in an ordinary folder on your Mac.

Website · Download the latest release · MIT license

What Amanu does

• Records meetings automatically. Amanu notices when a call app is using

• Produces a speaker-attributed transcript. Your microphone and the other

• Puts names to voices. Amanu uses calendar participants and evidence in the

• Writes a detailed summary. The result covers the topic, key points,

• Shows its work. The status window, menu bar, and Dock icon make it clear

• Keeps one folder per meeting. Audio, transcript, speaker names, summary,

Local when you want it, powerful when you need it

Recording always happens on the Mac. Amanu can also transcribe and summarize a meeting without sending its contents anywhere:

• Parakeet provides local transcription on Apple Silicon.
• The optional live transcript uses a separate on-device model.
• Ollama can write summaries locally when its Base URL is localhost/loopback.

There is no Amanu account and no hosted meeting library. No meeting content leaves the Mac unless you choose a cloud transcription or summary backend. Cloud and CLI summary backends receive the transcript plus available meeting context such as its title and calendar participants; Ollama keeps that work on the Mac when it is configured with a localhost/loopback Base URL. The complete data-flow description is in the privacy notice. Work that cannot run without a network is marked as deferred and resumed later instead of being silently dropped. A summary or naming pass that keeps reaching a model without getting an answer stops after five tries, until its settings, keys or backends change.

Anonymous product-usage reporting is enabled by default with a random install UUID. The last control in first-run setup, and the same control in Settings, turns it off. Recordings, transcripts, summaries, calendar contents, names, paths, keys, and error text are never included. The complete event and field list is public in What Amanu sends.

What a meeting leaves behind

A typical retained session looks like this:

~/Recordings/2026.09.02-1400 Weekly sync/
├── audio.m4a          # optional: microphone left, call audio right
├── transcript.md      # readable transcript with speaker names
├── transcript.json    # timed segments and engine provenance
├── speakers.json      # names, confidence, and supporting evidence
├── summary.md
├── meta.json          # timing, devices, trigger, and processing state
└── transcribe.log

Audio can be discarded automatically after a successful transcript. If transcription fails, Amanu keeps the source recording so it can be tried again. The recordings window shows what is complete, pending, or failed for every session.

Why Amanu is built this way

The less visible parts of Amanu come from failures measured on real calls, not from an idealized recording pipeline.

• No bot, virtual audio device, or kernel extension. A Core Audio process

• The two sides stay separate. Amanu records the microphone and system

• Recording must not change the meeting. Apple's duplex voice-processing

• Capture is crash-recoverable. The live tracks are uncompressed PCM in

• The folder is the database. meta.json and the artifacts beside it are

• **It is a signed application, not a background executable pretending to be

• Updates wait for the recording. Sparkle checks and installs signed

• Failures become tests. The automated suite covers interrupted sessions,

The constraints behind these choices are documented in Things that will bite. Design notes live in docs/specs.

Install

Install with Homebrew:

brew install --cask gsamat/tap/amanu

Or download the disk image from the latest release, drag Amanu.app to Applications, and open it. The first-run setup requests microphone, system-audio, and optional calendar access, then asks how meetings should be transcribed and summarized.

Requirements:

• macOS 14.2 or later.
• Apple Silicon for local transcription and the live transcript.
• The distributed app is universal (arm64 and x86_64). On Intel, recording

The release is signed with a Developer ID certificate and carries a stapled Apple notarization ticket. Amanu checks for signed updates automatically and will not install one during a recording.

Build from source

Amanu is one Swift 6 package. SwiftPM builds the executable; make app builds the pinned LocalVQE native assets, then assembles and signs the application bundle without an Xcode project. Building from source requires CMake as well as Xcode's command-line tools.

git clone https://github.com/gsamat/amanu.git
cd amanu
make app
make run-app
swift test

make run-app launches through LaunchServices, which matters because macOS attributes privacy permissions to the process responsible for starting the capture. A checkout with no signing certificate falls back to ad-hoc signing; that is sufficient for development, although macOS may ask for permissions again after a rebuild.

Before changing capture, packaging, permissions, or releases, read CLAUDE.md, Things that will bite, and Releasing.

CLI

First launch creates ~/.local/bin/amanu, pointing into the installed app so scripts use the same signed program as the UI.

amanu doctor                 # check permissions, engines, and configuration
amanu record start           # ask the running app to start recording
amanu record stop
amanu sessions               # list recordings and outstanding work
amanu process <folder>       # finish or retry one meeting
amanu format-transcripts      # rebuild AssemblyAI Markdown from saved transcripts
amanu setup                  # reopen first-run setup

Run amanu --help or amanu --help for the complete command-line interface. Most people never need it: recording and post-processing are automatic, and the app exposes the same controls.

Configuration

Settings writes ~/.config/amanu/config.json. The file is optional and stores only values that differ from the defaults. A compact example:

{
  "recordings_dir": "~/Recordings",
  "keep_audio": false,
  "analytics": true,
  "interface_language": "auto",
  "transcription": {
    "enabled": true,
    "engine": "auto",
    "cloud": "assemblyai",
    "language": "ru",
    "assemblyai": { "api_key_path": "~/.config/amanu/keys/assemblyai" }
  },
  "auto_record": {
    "enabled": true,
    "mic_activity": true,
    "calendar": false,
    "start_delay_seconds": 12,
    "stop_delay_seconds": 15,
    "min_duration_seconds": 45,
    "silence_stop_minutes": 10,
    "max_duration_minutes": 300,
    "apps": ["us.zoom", "com.google.Chrome"],
    "ignore_apps": []
  },
  "summary": {
    "enabled": true,
    "backend": "auto",
    "language": "ru"
  },
  "on_stop": "my-hook"
}

• recordings_dir selects the session folder; keep_audio retains the compact

• on_stop gets the session folder as its only argument and runs once per

• transcription.* covers enabled, engine, cloud, local_engine, model, and language.

• auto_record.* covers enabled, mic_activity, calendar,

• speaker_names.* covers enabled, backend, and model. Naming sends

• summary.* covers enabled, backend, language, model,

• mic_voice_processing enables Apple's capture-time voice processing;

• interface_language is auto, en, or ru. dock_icon, menu_bar_icon,

Inline and file-based API keys remain supported for compatibility, but the UI never displays an inline secret. Environment variables take precedence.

Project

Amanu began as a fork of digimata/quill and has since been substantially rewritten. The fork grew into a native app with first-run setup, automatic recording, live transcription, speaker naming, a resumable processing pipeline, local and cloud backends, crash recovery, a regression suite, and signed automatic updates. FORK.md records the project's provenance and explains how the architecture diverged.

The name comes from amanuensis: a person whose job is to write down what is said. Amanu is free software under the MIT license; dependency licenses are listed in third-party notices.