Another meeting notetaker?
Hi, I'm Michael. I've been building apps for fifteen years.
For the last few of those years, my meeting notes were half sentences in whatever editor happened to be open.
When AI came along, I had the same idea as plenty of other people: a meeting notetaker. Audio recordings and half-correct, endlessly long transcripts of meetings are no use on their own. But together with AI they genuinely help. AI can summarize the transcript, and the perfect meeting notes appear. It doesn't even matter much if a word here and there was transcribed wrong. Or better still: paste the whole transcript into the AI of your choice, and you have perfect context for the next task, especially as a software developer.
But I had to wait until I could build the idea the way I wanted it: an app without a subscription, no pasting in OpenAI or Anthropic API keys, no transcription in somebody else's cloud, and no downloading transcription models onto the Mac. With macOS 27 everything was finally in place: SpeechAnalyzer had been reworked and now handles long meetings well. And Apple Intelligence Private Cloud Compute was available, with a context window big enough for a 90-minute call.
What bothered me most about the other meeting notetakers I tried was that they were either too technical and had too many features, or they ran transcription on a server, which means my data didn't stay private. And most of them require a subscription. So I built one more meeting notetaker, the way I had pictured it: TinyScribe is now the app I open every workday: unobtrusive, lightweight, and it protects my privacy.
Of course I still have plenty of ideas: matching up meeting participants, a calendar view, and grouping meetings into projects, to name a few. The foundation is there, and I'll keep at it.
My day job is at Appdafür GmbH, the app development studio in Munich I founded thirteen years ago with Daniel, a friend from university. We'll maintain and keep building on TinyScribe, because we use it every day ourselves.
