Works with Microsoft Teams
Listen records Microsoft Teams calls from your Mac and writes them up on the same machine. No bot in the meeting, no tenant admin, and nothing uploaded.
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.
How it works
The menu bar is still there for a call it did not catch, or one you want running before anybody has joined. Either way your microphone goes to one track and everything Microsoft Teams plays goes to another, which is what lets Listen tell the voices apart afterwards.
Why this one is different
The usual way to take notes in a Microsoft Teams call is to let a bot join it, where it sits in the participant list with a name on it for the whole meeting. Listen records the audio your Mac is already playing instead, so the call has exactly the people in it that you invited.
Getting a notetaker into Teams usually means an administrator approving an app for the whole organisation, which is a long conversation to have about your own notes. Listen records your Mac. There is nothing for anybody to approve, and if your organisation would rather lock it down, it can be managed with the device profiles IT already uses.
After the call
Give the call 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 regulars name themselves after the first time.
Privacy
There is no Listen server, because there are no servers. The recording, the transcript and the names on it are all made on your own computer. No account, and nothing reports back beyond anonymous usage statistics, on by default and turned off in Settings whenever you like.
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
Listen records your own microphone and your Mac's own audio, so it is not an app inside Teams and nothing is installed in your tenant. Whether you may record a given meeting is a question for your employer, not for the software.
No. Nothing is added to the participant list.
Yes. Listen reads standard managed preferences, so an IT team can force sync off, restrict questions to a model on the machine, turn off dictation history or redirect backups.
No account of any kind is involved.
Yes, the same as the desktop app.
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.
Also works with
Listen is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to Microsoft Teams or its owner. Microsoft Teams is named here only to describe what Listen records.
