You know how you’re on a call, thinking “I should write this down,” but you don’t want to stop listening?

Then the call ends and your notes are half a sentence. What was decided, who said they’d do what, the number someone mentioned: gone, unless you let a note taker bot into the call.

I wanted the transcript without the bot, so I built Carbon.

A 36-second demo without sound. Join a call, and Carbon starts on its own: the dot in its menu bar icon turns red and a notification reads “Transcribing in English.” When the call ends, the meeting opens on its participants, a summary with key points and next steps, then every word. Copy Path hands the meeting’s Markdown file to an AI agent in a terminal. No sign-in, no bot, no cloud.

Carbon is a lightweight, native macOS app that sits in your menu bar and turns every meeting into a Markdown file on your Mac.

When Zoom, Google Meet, Teams or any other meeting app starts using your microphone, Carbon starts transcribing and the dot in its icon turns red. When the call ends, the meeting opens on a summary, key points then next steps, with the full transcript below it.

Each meeting is a plain Markdown file in ~/Documents/Carbon, so any AI agent can read it. Right-click a meeting, press ⇧ ⌘ C to copy its path, and paste it into Claude Code, Codex or whatever you use.

I wanted something I could trust with every call. So there’s no account to sign in to, no bot in the call and nothing uploaded. Carbon transcribes with Apple’s on-device speech recognition and deletes the audio once the transcript is written. Everything stays on your Mac.

If this feels like something you’d use, it’s free.

Download Carbon for Mac

Drag it to Applications and it shows up in your menu bar. It updates itself.

macOS 26 or later. Summaries need Apple Intelligence. Carbon asks for microphone, system audio recording and calendar access, to notice your calls and name them after your events.