Convene

macOS meeting transcription app — Granola-style. Captures both sides of a video call (mic + system audio), transcribes live with OpenAI Realtime, takes notes alongside, and produces an AI summary on stop.

BYO OpenAI key. Local-first storage. Multi-calendar via EventKit. Auto-detects Zoom / Teams / Webex / Meet / BlueJeans / Slack on launch.

Status

All seven phases of the implementation plan are scaffolded:

• Phase 1 — Audio capture (mic via VoiceProcessingIO + AEC, system via ScreenCaptureKit), 24 kHz PCM mono
• Phase 2 — Two-stream live transcription with server-VAD continuous mode, merged segment list
• Phase 3 — Notes editor + Markdown / JSON persistence to a security-scoped output folder
• Phase 4 — AI summary via OpenAI Chat Completions (response_format: json_schema)
• Phase 5 — EventKit-backed today's-events list (iCloud + Gmail + Fastmail + any other CalDAV/Exchange) with one-click "start recording from this event"
• Phase 6 — App-launch detection (Zoom / Teams / Webex / Meet / BlueJeans / Slack) with notification banners
• Phase 7 — Makefile, GitHub Actions release workflow, Homebrew cask template

The Xcode project (Convene.xcodeproj) is generated from project.yml and committed for convenience.

Repo layout

Convene/
├── Audio/                  Mic + system audio capture, WAV writer
├── Transcription/          OpenAI Realtime API client (transcription mode)
├── Calendar/               EventKit wrapper (multi-account)
├── Detection/              NSWorkspace meeting detector + UN delegate
├── Storage/                Markdown / JSON persistence with security-scoped bookmarks
├── Summary/                Chat Completions structured-output summary service
├── Models/                 MeetingStore, Meeting, TranscriptSegment
├── UI/                     SwiftUI views: meeting window, menu, settings
├── Util/                   Logger
├── Hotkeys/                KeyboardShortcuts setup
├── Keychain/               OpenAI API key storage
├── Info.plist
└── Convene.entitlements
.github/workflows/release.yml   Build → notarize → DMG → GitHub Release
homebrew/convene.rb             Cask template (publish to mblode/homebrew-tap)
Makefile                        build / install / archive / dmg / notarize

Bootstrap (one-time)

The Xcode project is generated from project.yml by XcodeGen.

brew install xcodegen           # one-time
xcodegen generate                # refreshes Convene.xcodeproj
open Convene.xcodeproj           # or `make install` to build + relaunch

Re-run xcodegen generate whenever you add a Swift file or change project.yml. SPM resolves the KeyboardShortcuts dependency automatically on first build.

Required permissions (first run)

Convene will prompt for these:

• Microphone — to capture your side
• Screen Recording — required by ScreenCaptureKit even for audio-only capture; no video is recorded
• Calendar — to attach meetings to events from all configured macOS calendars
• Notifications — for the "meeting detected" banner

Build

make build          # Release build
make install        # Debug build → /Applications/Convene.app → relaunch
make dmg            # Build + sign + create DMG
make notarize       # Build + DMG + notarize (requires APPLE_TEAM_ID, NOTARIZE_APPLE_ID, NOTARIZE_PASSWORD)
make clean          # Remove /tmp/convene-build

Reuse provenance

Bits of code adapted from sibling projects:

• Transcription/RealtimeTranscriptionClient.swift — verbatim from ~/Code/mblode/commandment/. Used for one-shot commit/transcribe; not currently wired (kept available for future use).
• Transcription/LiveTranscriptionStream.swift — new for Convene; continuous server-VAD transcription.
• Keychain/KeychainManager.swift, Util/Logger.swift, Hotkeys/HotkeyManager.swift — adapted from ~/Code/mblode/commandment/ (service id / log filename swapped).
• Audio/MicCapture.swift — slimmed-down adaptation of ~/Code/mblode/rubber-duck/apps/macos/AudioManager.swift. Kept the 24 kHz PCM mono pipeline + VoiceProcessingIO hardware AEC + noise gate. Dropped the playback-coupled software AEC and startup planner (not relevant for meeting transcription).
• Everything in Audio/SystemAudioCapture.swift, Audio/AudioCaptureCoordinator.swift, Audio/WAVFileWriter.swift, Calendar/, Detection/, Storage/, Summary/, and most of Models/ and UI/ — new.

Release flow

Tag-driven via GitHub Actions:

git tag v0.1.0 && git push origin main --tags

The release.yml workflow builds → signs (Developer ID) → notarizes → creates a GitHub Release with the DMG attached → signs and publishes the Sparkle appcast → updates the Homebrew tap.

Required secrets: DEVELOPER_ID_CERT_P12, DEVELOPER_ID_CERT_PASSWORD, APPLE_TEAM_ID, NOTARIZE_APPLE_ID, NOTARIZE_PASSWORD, SPARKLE_PRIVATE_ED_KEY, and HOMEBREW_TAP_TOKEN.

Sparkle checks https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mblode/convene/main/appcast.xml, and the generated Homebrew cask is published to mblode/homebrew-tap.