I waited 6 months for someone to build a local Granola. Nobody did, so I did.
A few months ago a friend asked me what she should use to transcribe her therapy sessions. Granola came to mind first. Then I read their privacy page and shut up.
I figured someone would build the local-first version. After 6 months of waiting I gave up and built it myself.
Levi is what came out. Menu bar app for macOS. It auto-detects when a meeting app opens the mic, records your voice and the system audio at the same time, mixes them, runs denoise, transcribes everything locally with Parakeet v3, and diarizes who said what. No bot in your call. No account. No cloud. One time payment.
The technical bits, the ones I'm proud of and the ones I'm not:
Capture: uses Apple's Audio Process Tap API for system audio, which means no virtual driver, no BlackHole, no aggregate device the user has to wire up. The cost is macOS 14.4+ only, which already cuts roughly a third of Mac users out of the box. Ouch.
Denoise: GTCRN running offline through a vendored sherpa-onnx, post recording, file in and file out. It's a tiny model (sub 1 MB) but the cleanup on noisy mics and noisy rooms is good enough that Parakeet's word error rate drops noticeably on the same audio. This was the single biggest quality win and almost nobody asks about it.
Transcription isolation: Parakeet v3 and Sortformer diarization run inside a sandboxed XPC helper. The main app ships with zero network entitlement. Models are downloaded on demand into the helper's own sandbox cache. Took me longer than I want to admit to get right.
100% AppKit, NSStatusItem, NSPopover. No Electron, no SwiftUI. I wanted it to feel like macOS, not like a web app in a trench coat.
What I keep going back and forth on, and where I'd value your read:
1) No AI summaries in v1. Half my testers want them. The other half says adding summaries turns Levi into yet another meeting AI tool. I don't know which half is right.
2) Pricing. Currently a one time purchase through the Mac App Store, no subscription. People keep telling me I'm leaving 80% of revenue on the table and they're probably right. But the moment I add a subscription I become the thing I was trying to avoid.
3) Distribution. Mac App Store only right now. I'm looking at Paddle on the side for coupons and trial flows, but that's another month of work for unclear payoff.
If you try it, the most useful thing you can tell me is "I expected X and didn't find it." That's the input I can't generate myself.
Site: https://levirecorder.app
Mac App Store: https://apps.apple.com/br/app/levi-meeting-audio-recorder/id6765791159
I'll be replying to everything in this thread for the next 48 hours. Bring the hard questions.
