How to Transcribe a Meeting Offline on Mac
Updated
Yes. With Rebrief for Mac, offline meeting transcription works once the models have downloaded. Recording, transcription, meeting notes and Ask all run on your Mac with no internet connection. Only two things use the network: the one-time model downloads, and limited usage statistics, which you can switch off in Settings.
That helps in a room with weak Wi-Fi, on a train, or when you would rather the meeting audio never left your laptop. An online call still needs internet while it runs, but the transcript and notes are made on your Mac afterward. Rebrief can't recover words that never reached you during a connection drop.
Can you transcribe meetings without internet on a Mac?
You can, as long as the transcription runs on the Mac itself. Many meeting tools send the audio to a server to transcribe it, so they stop working when the connection goes. Rebrief transcribes on your Mac with the Whisper large-v3 speech model, which covers 99 languages and detects the language separately for each side of the call. The meeting notes come from a language model that also runs on the Mac.
Transcription happens after the meeting, not during it. How long it takes depends on the length of the meeting and your Mac, and you can start a new recording while the last one is still being processed. If you are weighing this against a cloud notetaker, our Otter alternative for Mac post compares the two approaches.
What to download before you go offline
Do the setup while you still have a connection. Rebrief needs an Apple Silicon Mac with macOS 15 or later; there is no Intel build. According to the support page, the downloads are:
- About 3.1 GB for speech recognition.
- 208 MB for the meeting index, which Ask uses to search your meetings.
- Another 3 or 6.8 GB for meeting notes and Ask, depending on your Mac.
Check that all of them have finished. If the notes model is still missing, Rebrief records and transcribes meetings as normal, but the notes only appear once that download is complete. That is the most common way to end up offline with a transcript and no summary.
While you are online, also grant the two permissions Rebrief asks for: the microphone, and Screen and System Audio Recording, which lets it record what your Mac plays. Without the second one, an online call is recorded with your microphone only.
How to transcribe a meeting offline, step by step
- Finish the downloads and permissions above while connected.
- Test it once offline. Turn off Wi-Fi, record a minute of yourself talking, and check that a transcript and notes appear.
- Start recording when the meeting begins. If you switched on automatic recording during setup, Rebrief starts when an app is using your microphone and speakers at the same time. For a meeting in a room, or a call you only listen to, start it yourself from the menu bar.
- Write your own notes only for what the audio can't hold: a question you still want to ask, a diagram on the whiteboard, or your own view of a proposal. Rebrief records audio only.
- Keep the Mac awake. Each recording stops before the Mac sleeps and has a hard limit of eight hours.
- Stop the recording. Rebrief writes the transcript first, then the meeting notes, all without a connection.
For a meeting in a room, check in your test that people farther from the Mac are audible. If a remote participant's line breaks up during an important answer, ask them to repeat it. The recording only holds what came through.
What you get after the meeting
The meeting notes cover what happened, the decisions, key points, action points and open questions. Start with the decisions and action points. Check that each action has the right owner and that a suggested deadline actually became an agreed one. A date corrected near the end of a discussion matters more than the first date someone mentioned. If nobody agreed to own a task, leave the owner open and ask, rather than guessing from context.
When a question comes back weeks later, use Ask. Try something specific, such as "What did we decide about the launch date?", and add the project name if several projects discuss similar things. Ask shows the transcript lines each answer came from, so you can open the passage and read the exchange around it. Check that a later meeting didn't change the decision. Ask works offline too.
Every meeting is a folder on your Mac. You can export the transcript as Markdown, plain text, SRT or WebVTT, save both audio tracks, and copy the notes as Markdown into your own documents. That lets you prepare the follow-up offline and send it once you are connected again.
Common questions
Is my audio uploaded anywhere?
No. Recording, transcription, notes and Ask answers all run on your Mac. The only network use is the one-time model downloads and limited, pseudonymous usage statistics, which you can switch off in Settings. The privacy policy lists exactly what those statistics include.
Does it transcribe live during the meeting?
No. Rebrief transcribes after you stop recording. If you need live captions during the meeting, you need a different tool.
Can I transcribe an audio file I already have?
Rebrief works from its own recordings. To get a transcript of other audio, play it on your Mac while Rebrief records, and start the recording by hand.
Is offline transcription free?
Recordings up to 15 minutes are free and complete, with transcription, notes and export. A one-time purchase removes the limit. There is no subscription and no account, so a short offline test costs nothing.
Tell people you are recording
Rebrief doesn't join the call or announce itself, so tell the other people before you record. Recording laws differ by country and state, and some require everyone's consent. Follow your organization's rules too.
Try it before the meeting that matters
Record a short permitted conversation under 15 minutes with Wi-Fi off, then find one decision in the notes and the line in the transcript that supports it. The same offline setup works for study, which our guide on how to record and transcribe lectures on Mac covers. You can download Rebrief from rebrief.co.