Why ordinary recording falls short
Your microphone is designed to capture your voice, not clean digital output from Zoom, Teams, Meet, Slack, Webex, or FaceTime. Turning the speakers up and recording the room mixes both sides with echo, keyboard noise, and acoustic processing. A cloud meeting bot avoids that acoustic problem but becomes another participant, may require calendar access, and sends the call through an external service.
The two-track approach
LokalBot records the microphone as the “Me” track. At the same time, a Core Audio process tap records the selected meeting application's output as “Them.” The tracks are kept synchronized and processed on the Mac. This gives the transcript an immediate speaker boundary without relying on a bot or trying to infer whether every sentence came from you.
When multiple remote participants speak, optional on-device diarization can divide the “Them” side into additional speakers. Diarization is probabilistic, so names and boundaries may still need editing after a difficult or overlapping conversation.
What the other participants see
No account joins the room, no virtual participant appears in the roster, and no bot announces itself. That makes the workflow less disruptive, but it does not make recording invisible in a legal or ethical sense. Tell people when required, obtain consent, and follow employer and platform policies. LokalBot is a personal recorder; it cannot decide whether a particular meeting may be recorded.
Permissions and controls
- Microphone access captures your side.
- System-audio access enables the process tap for the other side.
- Manual recording is the fresh-install default.
- Ask-first or automatic modes can react to supported meeting apps after you enable them.
- Calendar access is optional and can help detect and title scheduled meetings.
After the call
The selected local speech model transcribes the synchronized audio. The built-in language model can turn the transcript into a TL;DR, decisions, and action items. Because the capture sources are separate, you can replay the meeting with a clearer “Me” versus “Them” context and search from a result back to the relevant timestamp.
A pre-meeting test worth doing
Open the actual meeting app, play remote audio, speak into your microphone, and make a short recording. Verify that both tracks show activity and play back correctly. macOS permissions and device routing can change when you switch headsets, docks, or output devices, so repeat this check before an unusually important call.