Debrief turns your reflections into a living brief on everyone you work with. Debrief Recorder makes those briefs sharper. It sits in your menu bar and transcribes the meeting right on your Mac. That catches what a two-minute reflection leaves out: exact commitments, who said what, and the details you'd never write down.
Entirely optional and decided per meeting. Debrief works exactly as it always has without it. The recorder just gives it more to reason over.
Most meeting tools upload your recording to a server to transcribe it. Debrief Recorder doesn't. Transcription and speaker separation both run on your own Mac, using Apple silicon. The recording is deleted once the transcript is ready. Only text reaches your account. It is encrypted in transit, encrypted at rest, kept separate from every other user's, and never used to train AI models.
The app reads your connected calendar and prompts from the menu bar when a meeting starts. Record the ones where detail matters and skip the rest. You do not even need a calendar event for ad-hoc conversations.
Microphone and system audio are captured together and transcribed locally with Whisper on Apple silicon. Speaker separation runs on-device too, so every point is attributed to the right person.
The transcript syncs and joins your own reflection as source material. Commitments land in the right thread, working-style notes accumulate from real evidence, and every person’s brief gets more specific.
Whisper runs locally on Apple silicon. Audio never leaves your Mac.
Record the conversations where detail matters. Skip the ones where it doesn’t.
Records your mic and system audio together, so you get both sides of the call.
Local diarization separates voices; you confirm the names once and it remembers.
Prompts automatically when a meeting on your connected calendar begins.
Capture hallway conversations and unplanned calls without a calendar event.
Pause for the off-the-record parts. Failed syncs retry on their own.
No. Recording and transcription both happen on your Mac. Whisper runs locally on Apple silicon, and speaker separation runs locally too. Only the finished text transcript is sent to your Debrief account, encrypted in transit and at rest.
Never. Debrief Recorder captures your microphone and your Mac’s system audio directly, so nothing shows up in the participant list and nobody gets a join notification.
Any of them. Because it records system audio rather than integrating with a specific platform, it works with Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, in-person conversations, and anything else playing through your Mac.
No — it strengthens them. Your reflection carries the judgment: what mattered, what you read between the lines, what you plan to do. The transcript carries the detail underneath it. Debrief uses both, and a recorded meeting still produces a full brief on its own if you don’t get around to writing anything.
The Mac app is free on the Mac App Store. It syncs to your existing Debrief account, so the debriefs it creates count toward whatever Debrief plan you are on.
A Mac running macOS 14.0 or later, and a Debrief account. The app is about 2.3 MB and lives in your menu bar.
Free on the Mac App Store, and it syncs to your existing account. Everything you already do in Debrief keeps working exactly the same.