Changelog

What's new in Serial Notes

0.4.0

Serial Notes for macOS 27

  • Takes advantage of macOS 27's Apple Intelligence — with macOS 27's newer, more capable on-device model, Serial Notes writes your summaries and action items with it automatically, and everything still happens on your Mac.
  • Fixed a bug where long meetings lost their summary on macOS 27 — a long meeting could finish with no summary or action items. Serial Notes now works through it in pieces the model reliably finishes, including meetings over an hour, and if part of a meeting still can't be summarized, a short note says so instead of the summary passing as complete.
  • Fixed a bug where parts of a conversation were left out of the summary — Apple's on-device model sometimes declined ordinary conversation as potentially sensitive. Those parts are now retried in a form the model accepts.
  • Fixed a bug where one person in a 1:1 got two labels — the other person in a two-person call could be split into "Person 1" and "Unknown speaker 1". Short replies like "yeah" and "mm-hmm" now stay with whoever said them, so there's one speaker to name afterwards.
  • Fixed a bug where a brief voice was folded into another speaker — someone who speaks only for a moment now gets their own label instead of being merged into whoever talks most, and phantom extra speakers are much rarer. Each "who is this?" sample clip now uses only that person's speech.
  • Fixed a bug where a stuck punctuation step could hold up finishing — if the on-device model hangs while punctuating, Serial Notes now moves on after a few seconds instead of waiting for it.
  • Still supports macOS 26 — the speaker and summary fixes apply on macOS 26 as well.

Release on GitHub

0.3.2

A small release that updates the built-in updater for security

  • Updater security hardening — the app's update installer (Sparkle) moves to 2.9.6, which closes two local symlink weaknesses in how a downloaded update is moved and validated before it is installed. Updates look and behave exactly as before.

Release on GitHub

0.3.1

Keyboard shortcuts for styling notes, better speaker labels, and more dependable meeting detection

  • Style notes with keyboard shortcuts — in the notepad, ⌘B bolds, ⌘I italicizes, ⌘E makes inline code, ⌘K makes a link, ⇧⌘X strikes through, and ⇧⌘H highlights. They toggle on and off, work on a selection or right at the caret, know their way around lists and headings (bolding a list item styles the text, never the bullet), and work on non-Latin keyboard layouts.
  • Short remarks keep their speaker — a brief line like a "good morning" at the top of a call was sometimes attributed to a phantom "Unknown speaker"; those now fold into the right person.
  • Back-to-back meetings both offer to record — meeting detection keeps watching while a recording finishes, so a second call that starts before the first wraps up gets its record prompt the moment you stop. Prompts also no longer appear for calls that already ended, while the app is quitting, or after recording a voice sample.
  • Updated speech models — the on-device transcription stack is upgraded: final transcripts no longer show occasional garbled words at processing boundaries, and long recordings no longer slowly grow memory use. The first launch after updating downloads the refreshed models once.

Release on GitHub

0.3.0

Serial Notes is now compatible with Notion, plus a few other fixes

  • Send to Notion — connect your workspace once (in Settings or the setup guide) and every finished meeting files itself as a page under a "Meeting Notes" page Serial Notes creates for you: your notes, the summary, action items, and the full transcript. Off by default, and the connection can only add pages — it can never read your workspace. Everything else still happens on your Mac.
  • Keeps working if the page is deleted — if you delete or trash the Meeting Notes page in Notion, the next meeting recreates it. If the connection expires, Settings shows a reconnect badge instead of failing silently.
  • Fixed: opening Settings could crash — v0.2.3 and v0.2.4 could crash the moment Settings opened, from a resource lookup that only failed on installed builds while working fine in development.
  • Notepad polish — ordered-list numbers now line up with the drawn bullets.

Release on GitHub

0.2.4

Improvements to the notepad's Markdown rendering

  • Bullets appear on the spot — type *, -, or + and a space and the bullet renders immediately, no Return needed. Raw syntax shows only where your caret is, Obsidian-style.
  • Task checkboxes — - [ ] and - [x] render as ☐ and ☑︎, and Enter continues the list with a fresh unchecked box.
  • Ordered lists keep count — inserting an item mid-list renumbers everything after it, and typing a number under an existing list resumes its numbering instead of starting over. 1) style markers work too.
  • Backspace understands lists — at the start of an item it outdents nested items, then removes the marker cleanly, instead of eating invisible characters one keystroke at a time.
  • More ways to style — __bold__ and _italic_ underscores, ~~strikethrough~~, ==highlight==, `inline code`, [links](…), and backslash escapes, all rendered live.
  • Exports match the notepad — one shared grammar now drives both the notepad and Apple Notes export, so every heading level, task glyph, strikethrough, code span, and link lands in Notes the way you wrote it.
  • Sturdier all around — links with parentheses in the URL no longer truncate, script-scheme links stay inert text, flag==true style prose stays literal, and pathological list numbers can no longer crash the app.

Release on GitHub

0.2.3

Your next meeting doesn't wait for your last one

  • Record back-to-back meetings — hit Record the instant your next call starts, even while the previous meeting is still processing. Capture begins immediately, the earlier meeting finishes its transcript and summary in the background, and the new meeting's transcript quietly catches up. Stop is just as instant: the recording ends the moment you press it, so post-meeting chatter never leaks into your notes.
  • Toggle the notepad from anywhere — a new global shortcut (default ⌃⌘N, changeable in Settings → General) shows or hides the meeting notepad while you're recording, even over a full-screen Zoom or Meet. The notepad is also ready the instant a recording starts — no more waiting for the previous meeting to finish processing.
  • See where processing stands — stack up several quick recordings and the menu bar shows "Processing meeting 1 of 3" instead of one endless bar.
  • Recordings survive hardware hiccups — if your audio device disappears mid-meeting, the recording now stops and saves what it captured instead of freezing with a running timer.
  • Quitting is dependable — quitting mid-processing still finishes saving your meetings, and can no longer stall behind a first-launch model download or an unanswered permission prompt.
  • Meeting notes can't get lost — in the rare case notes can't be added to their transcript, every affected meeting now keeps its own recovery copy and restores it on a later launch — even when several meetings are affected at once.

Release on GitHub

0.2.2

Transcripts now read like a conversation, not a stream of fragments

  • One block per speaker turn — continuous speech from the same person now renders as a single readable block instead of splitting at every brief pause. A new block still starts when someone else speaks or after a long silence, so timestamps stay useful for jumping around.
  • Stray punctuation cleaned up — a lone mark from the recognizer no longer opens a block of its own (". I am very tired") or doubles up ("day..") — it lands at the end of the sentence it closes.
  • Long monologues summarize reliably — an uninterrupted stretch of talk can no longer overflow the on-device model and silently vanish from the summary and action items.
  • Sharper speaker naming — the post-meeting "who is this?" clips and sample quotes are anchored to exact utterance timings, so they reflect a speaker's real speech.
  • Auto-stop summaries stay clean — words captured in the few seconds after a call ends can no longer sneak into the summary.

Release on GitHub

0.2.1

A recording should never mess with the rest of your Mac

  • Fixed: recordings could corrupt other apps' graphics on macOS 26.5 — during meetings, on-device transcription could trigger a macOS GPU driver bug that made other apps mis-render system-wide (browser windows and Google Docs smearing into black artifacts until they were relaunched). Transcription and speaker identification now run entirely on the CPU and Neural Engine, which sidesteps the driver bug — and turned out to be about 40% faster as well. Each recording's session.json now records which compute units were used, and a new test guard keeps GPU inference from ever sneaking back in.
  • Apple Notes exports keep their spacing — blank lines between paragraphs now survive the push into Apple Notes instead of collapsing together.

Release on GitHub

0.2.0

Take your own notes during a meeting — right next to the transcript

  • A notepad for during the call — a floating notes panel that stays visible over full-screen Zoom, Meet, or Teams. Open it from the menu bar ("Open Notes"), or flip the Settings toggle to have it open automatically when a recording starts.
  • Your notes land in the transcript — when the meeting ends, anything you wrote is added to transcript.md as its own "Notes" section above the generated summary and action items, so it travels with every export — including straight into Apple Notes and Bear.
  • Live Markdown as you type — headings, bold, italic, and bullets style themselves while the raw Markdown stays untouched underneath. Bullets nest with Tab and Shift-Tab, and numbered lists continue automatically on Enter.
  • Notes survive crashes and quits — drafts autosave while you type, and if your notes ever can't be added to the transcript, they're recovered and re-shown the next time the app opens instead of being lost.
  • Nested lists export properly — meeting notes pushed to Apple Notes now keep their list nesting instead of flattening.

Release on GitHub

0.1.8

Better speaker names after every meeting, and a fix for Bluetooth audio

  • Speakers get named after the call ends — a second, more careful pass runs over the saved system audio once a meeting finishes: voices you've enrolled (or named before) are recognized automatically, and two people the live pass lumped together as one "Person N" are split into the distinct speakers actually present. When a match isn't confident enough, Serial Notes suggests instead of guessing.
  • Bluetooth headphones no longer distort recordings — system audio from Bluetooth devices (like AirPods, which capture at 24 kHz) was saved with the wrong sample rate, leaving the recording pitched-up and time-warped and degrading transcription. Recordings are now stamped with the device's true rate.
  • Cleaner action items — long meetings no longer produce near-duplicate action items: they're consolidated, grouped by owner, and deadlines are preserved.
  • Setup guide stays in front — the first-run guide no longer gets buried behind other windows by the microphone and system-audio permission prompts, the system-audio checkmark lands without an extra click, and the welcome animation rises cleanly instead of flying in sideways.
  • No stray Dock icon — opening Settings no longer puts the menu-bar app in the Dock.

Release on GitHub

0.1.7

A friendlier first run, plus a speaker-naming fix

  • An animated walkthrough at setup — the welcome step now shows how Serial Notes works in four beats (live in the menu bar → detect a call → transcribe and summarize on-device → export to Markdown), drawn natively so it follows light/dark mode and respects Reduce Motion.
  • Correct names when your voice is enrolled — if you've enrolled your voice, someone else speaking on your microphone is no longer mislabeled with your name; the enrollment match identifies you instead.
  • Anonymous update counts — update checks now route through serialnotes.app so active installs can be estimated. Only the date and app version are counted — no IPs, identifiers, or accounts — and everything else still runs entirely on your Mac.

Release on GitHub

0.1.6

Version 0.1.6

Highlights

One menu-bar icon, always. Opening Serial Notes while it's already running — from Spotlight, Raycast, or an old download — now switches to the running copy instead of starting a duplicate. Instances left behind by earlier updates are asked to quit gracefully and cleaned up automatically.

Safer installs.

  • Double-clicking Serial Notes inside the disk image installs it to Applications in one step; if a copy is already running, it offers to quit and replace it (finishing any meeting it's saving first).
  • Installing an older version over a newer one now asks before downgrading.
  • An interrupted install can no longer remove your working copy.

Improvements

  • The storage folder picker opens at your currently selected location.
  • The menu-bar popover shows progress while a finished recording is transcribed and summarized.
  • Crisper menu-bar icon rendering.

Release on GitHub

0.1.5

Major quality fixes for transcripts and summaries

  • Punctuation and capitalization work again — a model-behavior change in macOS 26.5 made the on-device rewrite silently return text unchanged, so transcripts came out as raw lowercase. The rewrite path was reworked and now punctuates reliably (0 → 23 of 30 utterances in our benchmark), with a clean fallback when the model declines.
  • Long meetings summarize fully — summaries no longer drop later sections of long transcripts, and action items consistently keep their owners. Behind the scenes, summarization is now budgeted by the model's actual token window instead of word-count guesses, so it also scales automatically to future macOS releases with larger windows.

Release on GitHub

0.1.4

Polish for naming speakers and the setup experience

  • Cleaner speaker naming — the post-meeting speaker-naming sheet drops redundant captions, and voice previews stop after 8 seconds (recognizing a voice takes moments, not the whole clip).
  • Steadier setup guide — the primary button no longer jumps around between steps, and the guide can't be re-entered while a recording is still finalizing.
  • Compact update prompt — Sparkle updates show a simple "update available" prompt instead of an embedded release-notes pane.

Release on GitHub

0.1.3

Your notes can now go where you already work

  • Send to Apple Notes and Bear — new opt-in toggles deliver the finished transcript (with its summary and action items) straight into Apple Notes or Bear after each meeting. Everything stays local: Apple Notes via Automation on your Mac, Bear via its x-callback-url. The Markdown file on disk remains the source of truth.
  • Pick a destination during setup — the setup guide now includes Apple Notes / Bear tiles, plus assorted onboarding refinements.
  • Quieter update checks — manually checking for updates shows a compact "You're up to date" instead of a verbose dialog.

Release on GitHub

0.1.2

Installation grew up in this release

  • Drag-to-Applications DMG — downloads now open a styled installer window with the familiar drag-to-Applications layout.
  • First-launch move to /Applications — if you run Serial Notes from Downloads, it offers to move itself into /Applications and relaunch. (macOS quarantines apps run from Downloads in a way that silently breaks self-updating, so this keeps auto-updates working.)
  • No stray Dock icon — opening Settings or the setup guide no longer parks Serial Notes in the Dock; it stays a menu-bar app.
  • Full-bleed app icon sized for macOS Tahoe.

Release on GitHub

0.1.1

This release is about making meeting detection trustworthy

  • Meeting detection is now edge-triggered — the record prompt appears only when a meeting app actually starts capturing your microphone, not whenever one is idling with the mic held open (Zoom does this constantly). Launching the app mid-call no longer auto-prompts, and the prompt can no longer fire over a recording you just started yourself.
  • New app icon — and a standardized waveform brand mark used consistently across the app.
  • Warmer recording indicator — the live-recording accent in the menu bar and popover is now a warm orange instead of system red.

Release on GitHub

0.1.0

Serial Notes is now in public beta

The first public beta of Serial Notes — a menu bar–only macOS app that records your meetings, transcribes and summarizes them entirely on-device, and saves clean Markdown notes. No accounts, no cloud, no lock-in.

Highlights

  • Automatic meeting detection — Serial Notes notices when you join a call (Zoom, Microsoft Teams, FaceTime, Slack, Webex, Discord) and offers to record with a quiet floating prompt. It can stop on its own when the call ends.
  • On-device transcription + speaker separation — streaming speech recognition with diarization, so transcripts capture who said what.
  • On-device summaries & action items — Apple Intelligence restores punctuation and writes a summary plus action items at the end of each meeting.
  • Name your people — enroll your own voice and name the people you meet, so transcripts read by name instead of "Person 1."
  • Guided first-run setup — a quick walkthrough for microphone + system-audio permissions, Apple Intelligence, where notes are saved, and optional voice enrollment.
  • Built-in auto-updates — notarized, Developer ID–signed builds that update themselves (or check manually in Settings → General).
  • Private by design — all transcription, summarization, and action-item extraction run locally on your Mac. The only network traffic is the one-time speech-model download and update checks.

Install

⬇ Download SerialNotes.zip — notarized, so it opens with no Gatekeeper warnings. Unzip and drag Serial Notes.app into your Applications folder.

Requires macOS 26 (Tahoe) or later on Apple Silicon.

This is a beta

Serial Notes is at 0.x — free to use, with rough edges expected. Bug reports and feedback are very welcome via Issues. Your audio and transcripts never leave your Mac.

Release on GitHub

Try the beta today

Download for macOS Star on GitHub 3

Free & open source · No account, no cloud