Works with Zoom
Listen records Zoom meetings from your Mac and writes them up locally. No bot joins, nobody is notified, and the recording stays on your computer.
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 Zoom 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 Zoom 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.
Zoom is well served by notetakers, and every one of them announces itself in the participant list. That is fine for an internal stand-up and quite wrong for a first call with a client, an interview, or a conversation somebody agreed to have with you and not with a vendor.
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. It records your microphone and the audio Zoom is playing, so nothing is added to the meeting and the participant list is exactly who you invited.
No. Listen records your own machine, so it does not care who owns the meeting or whether recording is permitted in Zoom's settings.
Zoom announces its own recording feature. It has no way to know about this one, which is why you should say so yourself.
No. The calendar is optional and only used to name recordings after the meeting they line up with. Refusing it costs nothing else.
Yes. Listen records the audio, so it makes no difference whether that is the Zoom app or a browser tab.
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 Zoom or its owner. Zoom is named here only to describe what Listen records.
