Works with Telegram
Listen records Telegram calls from your Mac, writes them down and works out who said what. 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.
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 Telegram plays goes to another, which is what lets Listen tell the voices apart afterwards.
Why this one is different
Meeting notetakers work by being invited into a call as a participant. A Telegram call has no invitation to send, which is why most notetakers simply do not cover it. Listen never needed one: it records what your Mac is already playing, so the call is an ordinary sound on your machine and nothing has to let it in.
Telegram calls start from a conversation rather than from an invite, which is exactly the sort of call a notetaker built around a calendar will never notice. If the decision got made on Telegram, the record of it has been living in your memory.
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
Yes. Listen records what your Mac plays along with your microphone, so a Telegram call is captured like any other audio on the machine. The desktop app and the browser both work.
No. Listen has no connection to Telegram and Telegram has no way to know. Which makes telling them your job, and often the law's requirement. Say you are recording.
Yes. Your microphone and the call audio are recorded as separate tracks, so the transcript can attribute the turns rather than running them together.
No. Nothing is installed in Telegram and no account is connected.
Yes. Everyone on the far side arrives on one track, and Listen separates the voices on it and lets you name them once each.
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 Telegram or its owner. Telegram is named here only to describe what Listen records.
