For coaches and consultants
Listen records the call on your own Mac and writes it up there, so the hour goes to the person who booked it. Nothing joins the call, and nothing is uploaded anywhere.
This looks like an Intel Mac, and Listen will not run on it.
Listen transcribes on your own machine, and that needs the Neural Engine Apple introduced with the M1 in late 2020. There is no Intel version, and there is no version that would work.
Open the Apple menu and choose About This Mac. If it says Chip rather than Processor, this guess is wrong and you can download Listen as normal.
The problem
An hour of coaching is an hour of attention, and attention is the thing being bought. Every minute spent writing is a minute the client paid for and did not get, and the notes you manage to take are the ones you could catch rather than the ones that mattered. Then a fortnight later somebody refers back to a decision and you are reconstructing it from memory.
I stopped taking notes and started listening again. The write-up is waiting when we hang up.
Written as the buyer describes it. Not yet a quote from a named user, and it is not presented as one.
Why this one
Listen records the call and writes it up on your own machine, with names on the turns, and remembers voices between calls. So the person you speak to every other Tuesday names themselves after the first time, and what they said in March is a search away rather than a memory. None of it goes to anybody's server, which matters more here than it looks: people tell a coach things they have not told anybody, and the relationship runs entirely on that.
After the conversation
Give it your attention, not your notepad. Listen writes it up on your Mac's own chip, works out who spoke, and remembers the voices, so the people you see often name themselves after the first time.
Privacy
There is no Listen server, because there are no servers. No account, and nothing you record ever reports back.
Listen ships a machine-readable list of every connection it is allowed to make, inside the app itself, so none of that has to be taken on trust. What runs where sets out every connection it can make and how to check each one yourself, and there are answers ready for a privacy or HIPAA review.
Questions
Yes. Listen records your microphone and the audio your Mac is playing, so it captures both sides of a call in any app, and writes the transcript on the same machine.
Legally it depends where you both are, and practically the answer is always yes. Listen has no way to tell them, and a client who finds out afterwards is a client you have lost.
No. There is no Listen server and no account. The audio and the transcript are files in a folder on your own disk.
Yes, and it is the part most people end up relying on. Every transcript is searchable offline, and you can ask a question across all of them and click a reference through to the recording it came from.
Name somebody once and Listen suggests them the next time it hears that voice. Suggestions are ranked and never applied on their own.
Tag each recording with the client and filter to one. For a harder separation, LISTEN_LIBRARY points the app at a different library folder entirely.
Recording and transcription are free for ever, with no meeting count and no trial clock. Your recordings and transcripts are files on your own disk, so nothing you have already recorded can be moved behind a plan later.
Get Listen
Free to download, and free to record for as long as you like. Apple silicon, macOS 14 or later. The speech model is about 2.5 GB and downloads once, the first time you run it.
Written for
Nothing on this page is legal, clinical or professional advice. Recording law and professional duties vary by country and by state, and yours outrank anything written here.
