The app
The whole interface is one popover. The menubar feather becomes a live waveform while recording — it fills with the room's level, so you can see Quill hearing you without opening anything.
Rendered illustration of the current build's popover.
Fast, and honest about it
Measured on an A18 Pro MacBook Neo — not even an M-series chip — from a real 72-minute meeting:
72 minutes transcribed in 9
~8× realtime, using Apple's on-device recognition. Quill itself stays under 3% CPU and ~73 MB of memory — the heavy lifting runs in macOS's own speech engine.
Nothing is ever lost
Audio streams to disk while you record. If Quill — or your Mac — dies mid-meeting, the next launch finds the orphaned audio and finishes the note automatically.
It learns your vocabulary
Quill builds a lexicon from your vault — note titles, tags, wikilinks, attendees — and feeds it to the recognizer, so your project names stop being mangled. Add terms by editing Quill/lexicon.md in your vault; rename a speaker in a note and Quill learns the name for next time.
No fake analysis
With Apple Intelligence available (and its toggle on), summaries and action items come from the on-device model. Without it, Quill gives you the transcript and says so plainly — it never invents takeaways it can't support.
How it works
Press record, have your meeting
One click in the menubar or ⌥⌘R. Quill records the mic — and, optionally, system audio for remote calls — into a bounded, memory-safe pipeline.
Everything is processed on-device
Voice activity detection, speaker separation, and Apple's on-device speech recognition run locally. The audio and transcript never touch a network.
A finished note lands in your vault
YAML frontmatter, Dataview-ready fields, speaker-labeled transcript, action items, and takeaways — a plain markdown file in your vault's Meetings folder. Rename “Speaker 1” to a real name the way you'd edit any note.
Why local matters
Meeting audio is some of the most sensitive data you produce. Every popular meeting-notes tool uploads it. Quill's entire pipeline — capture, diarization, transcription, summarization — runs on Apple Silicon, and the source is open, so “nothing leaves your Mac” is checkable, not a promise.
Install
npm install -g @pepperchan/quill
Installs Quill.app to /Applications. Requires macOS 15+ on Apple Silicon. First launch: right-click → Open.