For lawyers
Listen records client calls on your own Mac and writes them up there. No bot in the call, no account, and no vendor holding privileged material.
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
Every meeting notetaker worth the name works by putting something in the call and something else on a server. For most work that is an ordinary procurement question. For a call with a client it is a party you did not intend, holding material you did not intend to share, in a place a third party can be asked to produce it from.
There is no third party. That is the entire reason I could use it.
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 has no server. The recording, the transcript and the speaker names are made on your machine and stay there, so there is no vendor to serve, no retention schedule but yours, and no account that could be compelled. Whether that changes your analysis is your call to make, and the architecture is set out plainly so you can make it.
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
There is nothing to subpoena. Listen has no server, no account and no copy of your library, so a request would have to come to you, which is where your existing obligations already sit.
That is a question for you and your jurisdiction, and the reason the design avoids it: Listen puts nothing in the call and nothing on anybody's server, so the usual third-party analysis has no third party to consider.
Often, and it depends entirely on where you and they are. Listen cannot tell anybody it is running, so say so yourself, and follow your bar rather than this page.
Tag recordings by matter and filter to one. For a harder separation, LISTEN_LIBRARY points the app at an entirely different library folder.
`listen activity` records every tool call, agent run, export, deletion and backup by name and id, never by content.
Yes. Standard managed preferences let IT force sync off, restrict questions to a model on the machine, turn dictation history off or redirect backups.
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.
