Kleoth

A local-first, bot-free meeting recorder for macOS. Kleoth captures your microphone and the other participants' system audio directly on your Mac, transcribes it on-device with Whisper, and writes plain Markdown/JSON files you own. No bot ever joins your call. Nothing leaves your machine unless you explicitly ask it to.

kleos (Greek κλέος) — "that which is heard." From the Proto-Indo-European root *ḱlew‑, "to hear."

Kleoth is an open-source alternative to hosted meeting recorders (tl;dv, Fireflies, Otter). Instead of inviting a bot into your call and uploading everything to a SaaS, it records both sides locally and keeps the transcript and summary as files in ~/Kleoth.

• Free & private by default — transcription runs on the Apple Neural Engine via WhisperKit. No account, no API key, no upload.
• Multilingual, automatic — Whisper auto-detects the spoken language (English, Russian, and dozens more). You can also pin a language in Settings.
• You vs. Them, for free — your mic and the system audio are recorded as separate channels, so speaker separation ("You" / "Them") is exact, with no diarization guesswork.
• Optional cloud upgrade, per meeting — one click sends a meeting to ElevenLabs Scribe for state-of-the-art transcription, using your key.
• Optional AI summaries — TL;DR, overview, action items, and per-speaker highlights via OpenRouter (any model), using your key. The summary is written in the meeting's own language.
• Your data, your files — every meeting is a folder of audio + transcript.md + summary.md + JSON in ~/Kleoth. Grep it, sync it, delete it. There is no database and no lock-in.
• Dictation anywhere (opt-in) — hold fn+shift, speak, release: Kleoth transcribes the utterance (ElevenLabs Scribe, your key), cleans it up with one short LLM pass (fillers gone, never translated), and pastes it into whatever app has focus. Double-tap for hands-free. Text-only history in ~/Kleoth/dictations/; a personal dictionary biases recognition toward your names and jargon. Audio is never kept.

Requirements

• macOS 14.4 or later. Apple Silicon recommended (the on-device model runs on the Neural Engine).
• ~600 MB one-time download for the Whisper model on first transcription, then fully offline.
• API keys are optional — only needed for the cloud transcription and AI-summary features.

Screenshots

The History window — searchable, day-grouped meetings with a TL;DR, summary, action items, and per-speaker highlights.

The menu-bar popover — start a recording and reach recent meetings.

Install

⬇ Download Kleoth-0.2.0.dmg (8.2 MB · SHA-256) — or browse all Releases.

Open the DMG and drag Kleoth.app onto the Applications folder. Kleoth lives in the menu bar (the lyre icon).

First launch (current builds are self-signed)

Until Kleoth ships notarized builds, macOS Gatekeeper will warn that it is from an unidentified developer. This is expected — the app is signed, just not yet with an Apple-issued Developer ID.

1. In Applications, right-click Kleoth.app → Open (don't double-click the first time).
2. In the dialog, click Open again. macOS remembers the choice; subsequent launches are normal.

This step exists only because notarization requires an Apple Developer Program membership (planned — see Roadmap). The build is otherwise complete and signed.

Permissions Kleoth requests, and why

Permission	Why	When
Microphone	Record your side of the conversation.	First recording.
System Audio Recording	Record the other participants (the audio your Mac plays). Shown under Privacy & Security → Screen & System Audio Recording.	First recording.
Keychain	Store your optional API keys securely. Click "Always Allow" so you are not re-prompted.	When you save a key, or on a re-signed build.
Calendar (optional)	Name a meeting from the calendar event you're in. Decline freely.	If you grant it.
Accessibility (optional)	Dictation only: watch for the fn+shift chord system-wide and send the ⌘V that pastes the dictated text.	When you turn dictation on in Settings.

Everything except the microphone and system-audio grants is optional. Kleoth never uploads audio unless you trigger the cloud transcription action yourself.

Quick start

1. Open Kleoth from the menu bar and click Start Recording (or use the global hotkey).
2. Have your meeting. The menu-bar icon shows you're recording.
3. Click Stop. The recording moves into your meeting list and transcribes in the background on-device — you can start another recording immediately.
4. When it finishes, open the meeting to read the transcript and (if you've added an OpenRouter key) the summary. The same content is on disk at ~/Kleoth/meeting-<timestamp>/ as transcript.md and summary.md.

That's it — no key required for steps 1–4.

Configuration

Open Settings from the menu bar. Everything here is optional:

• ElevenLabs API key — enables the per-meeting "Fully transcribe" (Cloud) action. The key needs the speech_to_text permission.
• OpenRouter API key — enables AI summaries and the dictation clean-up pass. Note: if your OpenRouter account blocks providers that may train on your data, choose a no-train model (e.g. z-ai/*, deepseek/*, google/*, meta-llama/*); accounts that enforce Zero Data Retention will also find google/* blocked (404 zdr-violation-by-account) — the default z-ai/glm-5.3-flash works under both guardrails; relax them at openrouter.ai/settings/privacy to use Gemini.
• Summary model — any OpenRouter model slug. Default: z-ai/glm-5.3-flash.
• Transcription language — Auto (detect per meeting) or pin a specific language.
• Dictation — enable hold-to-talk (fn+shift), pick the polish model (default google/gemini-3.5-flash-lite, the fastest correct one measured — ~0.9 s; if your account blocks Google the polish falls through to z-ai/glm-5.3-flash), edit your personal dictionary (one term per line; the first 100 are sent with each dictation), reset the pill position. Needs an ElevenLabs key; without an OpenRouter key the raw transcript is pasted as-is.

Keys are stored in the macOS Keychain and are never printed or committed.

CLI

The repo also ships a kleoth command-line tool for the same pipeline (audio file → transcript → summary → Markdown), independent of the app:

swift run kleoth transcribe meeting.m4a   # ElevenLabs Scribe; diarized; saves the meeting
swift run kleoth summarize  <dir|file>    # transcribe (if needed) + AI summary  (--model <slug>)
swift run kleoth rename     <dir>         # assign real names to speaker_0 / speaker_1 …
swift run kleoth render     <dir>         # re-render summary.md from summary.json (no API calls)

Run swift run kleoth <subcommand> --help for flags. The CLI resolves keys from environment variables (ELEVEN_API_KEY, OPENROUTER_API_KEY), a local .env, or ~/.config/kleoth/config.json.

Free summaries in Claude Code: the summarize-meeting project skill produces the same summary.json / summary.md using your Claude Code session — no OpenRouter key, zero API cost. Just ask it to summarize a meeting folder.

Integrations

• Raycast extension — integrations/raycast-extension/. Toggle/Start/Stop Recording, Search Meetings (open/copy summary, transcript, and paths), and Latest Summary. Import with npm install && npm run dev in that directory.
• Shortcuts / App Intents — Start/Stop/Toggle recording as app intents (see app/Sources/KleothApp). Note: SwiftPM builds don't run Apple's App Intents metadata extractor, so intents may not auto-surface in Spotlight; the URL scheme and hotkey work regardless.
• kleoth:// URL scheme — kleoth://record, kleoth://stop, kleoth://toggle, kleoth://summarize-latest. Callable from open, scripts, Raycast, etc.
• Global hotkey — bind a system-wide shortcut for toggle-recording in Settings.

Data & privacy

By default, nothing leaves your machine. Transcription is on-device; summaries and cloud transcription only run when you opt in with your own keys.

Each meeting is one self-contained folder, ~/Kleoth/meeting-yyyy-MM-dd-HHmmss/:

mic.m4a · system.m4a · meeting.m4a   # your audio (mic, system, 2-channel combined)
transcript.json · transcript.md       # the transcript (raw + rendered)
summary.json   · summary.md           # the AI summary (if generated)
speakers.json                         # speaker_0 / speaker_1 → display names (You / Them)
meta.json                             # metadata: duration, tier, timestamps, consent

Dictations are text-only: ~/Kleoth/dictations/<yyyy-MM-dd>.json holds the raw and polished text, the target app, language, and models per utterance; the audio clip is deleted as soon as it has been transcribed (it only ever lives in $TMPDIR/kleoth-dictation/). The personal dictionary is a plain JSON array at ~/.config/kleoth/dictionary.json.

Consent: recording conversations is regulated and the rules vary by jurisdiction — many places require all-party consent. Kleoth records both sides without a visible bot; that is a UX choice, not legal cover. Get every participant's consent before recording. The app surfaces a consent acknowledgement and stamps it into each meeting's meta.json.

Build from source

# Core library + CLI (deployment target macOS 13)
swift build && swift test                  # builds; runs the unit suite

# Menu-bar app (deployment target macOS 14.4)
swift build --package-path app             # compile-check the app + capture packages
bash app/setup-signing.sh                  # one-time: create the local "Kleoth Self-Signed" cert
bash app/make-app.sh release               # bundle, sign, install to /Applications

# Package a distributable DMG (self-signed tier)
bash app/make-dmg.sh                        # → app/dist/Kleoth-<version>.dmg (prints SHA-256)

The release process (version bump, the notarized public tier, tagging, gh release) is documented in docs/RELEASING.md.

Architecture

Two SwiftPM packages. Package 1 (repo root, macOS 13) is KleothCore — models, networking seam, transcription (ElevenLabs Scribe client + the engine-agnostic Transcriber protocol), summarization (OpenRouter client), rendering, speaker mapping, storage, and the meeting pipeline — plus the kleoth CLI. Package 2 (app/, macOS 14.4) is the KleothApp SwiftUI menu-bar agent and KleothCapture (Core Audio process-tap for system audio, AVAudioEngine for the mic, and the LocalTranscriber built on WhisperKit). The only non-Apple core dependency is swift-argument-parser; the app adds WhisperKit and KeyboardShortcuts.

Roadmap

• Notarized builds — Gatekeeper-clean install (needs Apple Developer Program enrollment). The signing/notarization pipeline is already wired in app/make-dmg.sh, pending the certificate.
• Homebrew cask — brew install --cask kleoth once releases are notarized.
• Sparkle auto-update.
• Whisper model-size picker — trade accuracy for speed/size.
• A default-engine toggle (on-device vs. cloud) and live captions are under consideration.

License

Apache License 2.0, except the Raycast extension (integrations/raycast-extension/), which is MIT-licensed — the Raycast Store requires MIT for published extensions.

Acknowledgments

• WhisperKit (Argmax) — on-device Whisper inference on Core ML / the Apple Neural Engine.
• KeyboardShortcuts (Sindre Sorhus) — the global hotkey.
• ElevenLabs Scribe — optional cloud speech-to-text.
• OpenRouter — optional AI summaries across many models.