Trace: Meeting summaries that never leave your Mac

Meeting summaries that never leave your Mac.

Trace captures your microphone, system audio and optional screenshots, transcribes locally on your Mac, and hands you a markdown transcript and summary with flagged moments inline.

Try Trace for free Also on the Mac App Store

Requires macOS 14.4 or later and Apple silicon.

Out of the way until you need it.

One keystroke brings Trace up over any application: Zoom, Teams, Meet, Slack, anything. No app to open, no window to place.

Mark the moment. Keep talking.

Hit ⌘K mid-call, type a short note, hit Enter. The moment is pinned to your transcript at the exact timestamp. You stay in the meeting, and anyone reading the transcript later sees exactly what mattered.

Markdown you can paste anywhere.

Trace provides you with clear markdown transcripts and summaries that you can use anywhere. Either copy the markdown from Trace directly or have it place the file anywhere in your filesystem. Trace can also send files directly to Obsidian, Bear, Drafts or Things with a button press.

Catch up without leaving the meeting

Missed something? Peek at the last few minutes.

Press ⌘/ and the pill grows upward into a live transcript of what was just said, interleaved with every key moment you flagged. The live summary runs entirely on-device, same as the final transcript. AI can also follow along too with the tracecli command line tool.

Your library

A home for your transcripts and summaries.

Trace stays out of the way, but when you need it you can open the home screen to see all of your past sessions. Play a recording back with the transcript highlighting along, fix transcription errors and names directly in the transcript, and search across everything you've recorded. Naming speakers is quick too, with suggestions from voices Trace already knows. You can also drop in audio or video you recorded somewhere else and it becomes a session like any other.

Trace

Dundies 2026 planning

ready · 6m 12s

Copy transcript ⏎

Every transcript, one click away.

Reach every session straight from the menu bar. Copy one, summarise it, send it to your notes app, re-transcribe it or open it in the home screen.

Your meetings, from the command line.

tracecli reads your past transcripts and summaries straight off disk. It can also drive Trace itself with commands to start, stop, summarise, and more. Trace is built to be scripted, so by using tracecli the terminal and your AI agents can reach Trace the same way you do.

$tracecli list

# STARTED DUR FLAGS NAME

1 2026-04-16 14:32 6:12 TSA Dundies 2026 planning

2 2026-04-15 10:05 48:30 TSA Design review

3 2026-04-14 09:00 22:14 TS· 1:1 with Paige

$tracecli summarise 1

Summarising ‘Dundies 2026 planning’ in Trace…

## Decisions

- Venue booked: Chili’s, same date as last year

- Michael to host again

$tracecli transcript --live --follow

Transcribing the meeting so far in Trace…

**Paige** [08:14] Are we good to start?

**Sam** [08:19] Yep, we are recording now.

**Paige** [08:26] Great. First up, the launch date.

Fast. Private. Out of your way.

On-device only

Nothing you record ever leaves your Mac. A local speech model runs on-device, with no servers and no accounts.

Seconds, not minutes

The fast model transcribes meetings in seconds on Apple silicon.

⌘RRecord
⌘KKey moment
⌘PPause
⌘MMute
⌘/Recap
⌘HHide pill

Keyboard-driven

Record, flag, recap, pause, hide. Every action has a shortcut. Remap any of them to match your muscle memory.

~/Library/Containers/info.traceapp.trace/Data/Library/Application Support/Trace/sessions/2026-04-16-onboarding-sync

mic.wav23 MB
system.wav23 MB
transcript.md4 KB
transcript.json12 KB
summary.md2 KB
meta.json1 KB

Yours, locally

Every session lives in Finder as plain audio and markdown. Move them into your vault, version them in git, or delete them.

Flag what matters, live.

Hit ⌘K mid-recording to mark a moment. Add a note while the conversation keeps going. Key moments sit inline in the transcript exactly where they happened.

**Sam**[36:40]Sure, does the 15th work for you?

**Paige**[36:44]Works for me. Lock it in.

**[36:44] Key moment:**Next meeting date decided

**Paige**[36:48]Perfect, I'll send a hold now.

Meeting-aware.

Trace notices when a meeting app picks up your microphone and offers to record automatically and remembers your answer per application. If you choose to connect your calendar then recordings automatically inherit the event title and you get a quiet reminder a minute before the meeting to start recording. When the call ends, Trace offers to stop recording so you don't forget. Calendars are opt-in, read-only, and off by default.

**Sam**[00:08]Should we ship the Friday build?

**Paige**[00:10]Yeah, the build succeeds and the tests pass.

Speaker-aware.

Trace splits the call by each person speaking. After the meeting you can put real names to them and Trace will remember them for next time.

Start Recording
Capture Key Moment
Summarise Last Meeting
Get Last Transcript
Pause Recording
Get Last Summary
+ 4 more

Shortcuts & Spotlight

Yours to automate.

Trace shows up in Shortcuts and Spotlight, with actions to start, stop, pause, flag a key moment, or grab the last transcript or summary. You can also have it run a Shortcut of your own the moment a transcription finishes.

Speaks your language.

The default accurate model understands 99 languages and picks the right one automatically. And when a meeting isn’t in yours, Trace can translate it, live or afterwards, on your Mac.

What did we agree about the venue?

You booked the same venue as last year and Michael is hosting again. The save-the-date goes out once catering is confirmed.

42:0642:14

Ask the meeting.

If you opt to enable Trace's AI features then you can chat with any of your sessions. You can ask questions and Trace will respond with timestamps you can click to jump to the exact point in the call. This uses the same on-device model as the summaries, so as always, the conversation stays on your Mac.

PDF
Word
Web page
Subtitles
Spreadsheet

•••••••••redacted before it leaves

Share it safely.

Generate a PDF, Word, a web page, subtitles or a spreadsheet from your transcripts and summaries. Trace can automatically redact sensitive information first by finding names, emails, phone numbers and addresses and removing them from the export.

Not another cloud tool.

No servers, API keys, accounts or telemetry. Your audio and your transcripts never touch a machine that isn’t yours.

macOS asks for System Audio Recording permission so Trace can capture audio from your other apps.

Read our full privacy policy

What you get

A clean, formatted transcript

Key moments that you flag sit inline, right where they happened. Your future self, your teammates, and your AI of choice can scan straight to what mattered.

An on-device summary

Press Summarise and the same local model writes up the decisions and follow-ups, ready to copy in a click.

Ask, and get a grounded answer

Ask a plain question about the meeting and get an answer drawn only from the transcript, with a timestamp you can jump to.

When is the next meeting, and who is sorting it?

The next meeting is set for the 15th. Paige is sending the calendar hold.

36:44

Compare

See how Trace stacks up.

Honest, on-device comparisons if you do not want a bot in the call or your audio in the cloud.

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No accounts, no cloud, no telemetry.