Bandje records your calls and meetings and turns them into text. On your Mac. Nothing leaves it.
Also included: Very fast dictation, for anyone who writes AI prompts all day. Optional summaries by Apple Intelligence, on device.
For Mac with Apple silicon and macOS 15 or later.
Why “Bandje”?
/ˈbɑɲ.cə/
“Bandje” is Dutch for a little tape: the cassette you used to record on. Start, stop, record. That part hasn’t changed.
What’s new is what happens after: a transcript with speaker names, and a summary in the format you choose. All on your Mac.
How it works
- 1
Start.
⌃⌥⌘RPress the shortcut. Bandje starts recording. Or click the cassette in the menu bar.
- 2
Talk.
Have your call as usual. In any app. Press the shortcut again to stop.
- 3
Read.
Anna Shall we move it to Friday?
Me Friday works.Read the transcript. With speaker names, ready seconds after you stop.
What it does
Records both sides of the call
System audio and your microphone go into one stereo file. Left is you, right is everyone else.
Works with any call app: FaceTime, Zoom, Teams, Meet, phone calls through your Mac. No bot joins your call. No screen recording.
Transcribes, with names
On your Mac, in 25 languages, with speaker labels. Name each speaker by listening to a short clip of them.
Import voice memos and other audio files too.
See all 25 languages
Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian
A page you can listen to
Every recording gets an interactive page. Click any sentence to hear it. The playing line is highlighted as you listen.
Tabs for the transcript and every summary, links to the files. One HTML file. Works offline.
Dictation, anywhere
Press ⌃⌥⌘D, speak, and the text appears where your cursor is.
Tap to start and stop, or hold to talk. Fast enough to use all day.
Summaries, if you want them
Optional, with Apple Intelligence on macOS 26. Also on your Mac.
Templates are plain text files. We include a meeting, a job interview and a customer interview. Change them, or write your own.
The small things
Choose your microphone and sound output straight from the menu.
Full help is built into Mac Help.
Your conversations stay on your Mac.
Audio, transcripts and summaries are stored in ~/Music/Bandje. Delete a folder and it’s gone.
No account. No analytics. No cloud, unless you turn on your own iCloud to sync with your iPhone and iPad.
One honest footnote: the app does a license and active-device check at most once a month for Desert Ant Labs, the maker of the speech models (who acts as an independent data controller for this signal). It sends a random install ID and version numbers, not tied to you. Never audio, never text.
Light on your Mac
- 60–70 MB
- of memory while running. The speech model is memory-mapped from disk, so macOS can reclaim it.
- 400 MB
- on disk for the speech and speaker models.
- macOS 15
- or later, on Apple silicon. Summaries need macOS 26 with Apple Intelligence turned on.
Also on iPhone and iPad.
Record a meeting on your iPhone or iPad, read it here. Same purchase, no extra cost.
Credits
Speech recognition (Voz) and speaker recognition (Who) by Desert Ant Labs, based on NVIDIA Parakeet TDT 0.6B v3 and pyannote community-1 (CC BY 4.0). Summaries by Apple Intelligence.