Bandje

Bandje records your calls and meetings, and turns them into text. On your Mac. Nothing leaves it.

There's more: Very fast dictation, for anyone who writes AI prompts all day. Optional summaries by Apple Intelligence, on device.

Mac App Store€4.99 once. No subscription. Build it yourself, freeSource on GitHub

Use the source, Luke.

For Apple silicon Macs with macOS 15 or later.

Why “Bandje”?

“Bandje” is Dutch for a little tape: the cassette you used to record on. Start, stop, record. That part hasn't changed.

What's new is what happens after: a transcript, who said what, and a summary in the form you choose. All on your Mac.

How it works

  1. 1

    Start.

    ⌃⌥⌘R

    Press the shortcut. Bandje starts recording. Or click the cassette in the menu bar.

  2. 2

    Talk.

    Have your call as usual. In any app. Press the shortcut again to stop.

  3. 3

    Read.

    Anna Shall we move it to Friday?
    You Friday works.

    Get a transcript. With who said what, seconds after you stop.

What it does

Records both sides of the call

System audio and your microphone go into one stereo file. Left is you, right is everyone else.

Works with any call app: FaceTime, Zoom, Teams, Meet, phone calls through your Mac. No screen recording.

Transcribes, with names

On your Mac, in 25 European languages, with speaker labels. Name each speaker by listening to a short clip of them.

Import voice memos and other audio files too.

Play a clip, type a name.

A page you can listen to

Every recording gets an interactive page. Click a sentence and hear it. The line you hear lights up.

Tabs for the transcript and every summary, links to the files. One HTML file. Works offline.

The recording page, open in Safari.

Dictation, anywhere

Press ⌃⌥⌘D, speak, and the text appears where your cursor is.

Tap to start and stop, or hold to talk. Fast enough to use all day.

Summaries, if you want them

Optional, with Apple Intelligence on macOS 26. Also on your Mac.

Templates are plain text files. We include a meeting, a job interview and a customer interview. Change them, or write your own.

The small things

Choose your microphone and sound output straight from the menu.

Full help is built in, in Mac Help.

Your conversations stay on your Mac.

Audio, transcripts and summaries are stored in ~/Music/Bandje. Delete a folder and it's gone.

No account. No cloud. No analytics.

One honest footnote: the app does a license check at most once a month, for the maker of the speech models. It sends a random install ID and version numbers. Never audio, never text.

Light on your Mac

60–70 MB
of memory while running. The speech model is memory-mapped from disk, so macOS can reclaim it.
400 MB
on disk for the speech and speaker models.
macOS 15
or later, on Apple silicon. Summaries need macOS 26 with Apple Intelligence turned on.

Credits

Speech recognition (Voz) and speaker recognition (Who) by Desert Ant Labs, based on NVIDIA Parakeet TDT 0.6B v3 and pyannote community-1 (CC BY 4.0). Summaries by Apple Intelligence.