Listen Download
NewPeople & Memory, and a weekly review

Listening changes everything.

Your AI doesn’t
know you yet.

Everything that makes you good at your work gets said out loud and then disappears: decisions, nuance, promises, the small details that matter about people. Notes catch a fraction of it. Listen turns the conversations you choose to keep into a memory of people, projects and decisions, where every answer links back to what was actually said.

No account · No meeting bot · Your audio stays on your devices

The problem

The best context never makes it into your notes.

The promise somebody made at the end of a call. Why the team rejected the first plan. The detail a client mentioned three months ago. The exact words behind a decision everybody now disagrees about. These are the things that make your next move better, and they are the first things ordinary notes lose.

  • You rebuild old decisions from fragments. The reason was said out loud once and written down nowhere.
  • You walk into recurring conversations cold. Ten minutes before the call you cannot remember what was left unresolved.
  • You teach your AI the same context every time. The first prompt is always the project, the people and the history, typed again.

How it works

Listen. Remember. Use.

Three ordinary things, and the middle one is the part nothing else does.

Listen A call on your Mac, with nothing joining it, or a conversation in a room on your iPhone. It asks the moment it starts, and “No” throws the audio away.
Remember It works out who spoke, and builds a memory of the people, projects and decisions you choose to keep. Each detail carries the sentence it came from.
Use Ask it, here, and get an answer with the receipts attached. See the whole library at once. Open the week and find out what actually changed.

A page per person

Every detail says where it came from.

A person's page is not a list of their recordings. It is what Listen has heard about them, and each line carries the recording, the speaker, when it was said and when it became true. Press one and you are looking at the sentence itself.

People
What they are responsible for, what they prefer, who they work with, and what changed since last time.
Projects
Decisions, the reasons behind them, what is still open, and when each of those moved.
Promises
What you said you would do, and what somebody said they would do for you.
Your thinking
The notes you wrote yourself, which are the one thing no transcript can infer.
The source
Every detail keeps the sentence it came from, who said it and when, so you can open it and check.

Off until you ask, per person. Nothing is generated in the background for anybody you have not switched on, and adding a person never calls a model. There is a daily limit and a global pause. Corrections survive a rebuild, and so does anything you pin, hide or exclude.

A detail can be out of date without being wrong, and the page says which. What somebody said themselves is marked differently from what was said about them.

The galaxy

Your whole library, in one picture.

Four shells around this Mac: your recordings, your notes, the people in them and the conversations you have had with Listen about any of it. A line is drawn wherever the library already records a relationship between two things.

Search in the sidebar and the picture narrows to what matches and what that connects to. Click a star to see what it is joined to; double-click to go there.

Nothing here is inferred. A note that names a meeting is a line. Somebody speaking in one is a line. A question you asked about one is a line. There is no similarity edge and no "these happened the same week" edge, so every line is a row you can go and read. Distance from the centre is the kind of a thing and nothing else, not how important it is and not how recent, because there is no measure of importance here that is not a guess, and a guess drawn as a distance reads as a fact.

Drawn from what is already on the disk and reaches no network. It stops on its own when the window is hidden, under Reduce Motion and in Low Power Mode, and Settings turns it off entirely.

This week

What changed, and what to do about it.

A deck of cards where the sidebar sits, with the galaxy beside it: the week's new conversations, people and notes arriving into the library you already had. Every card carries something to do. Name the speakers nobody labelled. Accept or correct a detail. Open somebody you have not spoken to in months.

Two of the cards look forward rather than back: what was promised, in the words somebody actually used, and what you already know about whoever you are seeing next.

The window is a named period rather than a rolling seven days, because "last 7 days" ending on a Tuesday afternoon is nobody's week and two readings an hour apart were two different reviews. This week, last week, this month, this year, Monday to Sunday. A finished period ends at its own last second, so it can be compared with the one before it.

It is derived, not stored. Nothing is generated on a schedule and nothing advances itself. A person's page has the same deck about them over the last ninety days.

What you do with it

Three questions you cannot answer today.

Ten minutes before the call

“Catch me up before I speak to Maria again.”

What you last agreed, what she is waiting on, and the thing she mentioned in passing that you meant to follow up. Each line opens the conversation it came from.

When an old decision comes back

“Why did we decide against annual pricing?”

The reasons, in the words they were argued in, with the date and the meeting. Not a summary somebody wrote afterwards.

When your AI needs to know something

“Draft the brief using what customers actually said.”

Your agent reads the relevant conversations over MCP and writes from them, instead of asking you to paste a folder of transcripts into the prompt.

Ask

Answers with the receipts attached.

Ask one conversation or all of them, in the app, out loud if you would rather. Every claim comes back with a numbered reference, and pressing it opens the recording at the moment it came from. If a model answers without reading anything, Listen says so. Retrieval is local: keywords and Apple's on-device semantic search, and it can tell you what it knew at a date in the past.

You choose the model: your own assistant subscription, your own API key, or a model running on your own Mac, in which case the question never leaves the machine.

And it reads from the tools you already use

The same retrieval is behind a command line and an MCP server, so Claude Code, Codex or anything else that speaks MCP can read your library directly rather than a folder of transcripts you paste into a prompt.

claude mcp add listen -- /usr/local/bin/listen mcp

An agent can write notes and tags. That is all. It cannot rename a speaker, correct a transcript, retitle a recording or delete one, and where it disagrees with what Listen believes about somebody it proposes a correction rather than applying one. A wrong note sits harmlessly beside the recording that disproves it. A wrong transcript edit is a fact that is simply gone, so those edits stay with you.

Every verb the command line has, and every tool the MCP server exposes →

Underneath

The record it is all built on.

A memory is only worth as much as what it was built from. Recording, transcription, the voices and the search over them are free, for ever, with no meeting count and no trial clock.

Record

Both sides of the call, and no bot in it.

Your microphone on one track, everything your Mac plays on the other. Nothing joins the call, so it works on WhatsApp and FaceTime as well as it does on Zoom, Meet and Teams. You do not have to remember to start it: Listen spots the call, begins recording, and only then asks whether you want it.

  • It is already recording when it asks, so the answer costs you nothing
  • Say never once and it stops asking about that app
  • Asks to record audio, not your screen

Transcribe

Scrubbing a meeting on the waveform while the sentence being spoken lights up in the transcript.

Written up before you've made coffee.

Transcribing happens on your Mac's own chip, about 240 times faster than real time on an M4 Max. Play a meeting back and the transcript follows along, sentence by sentence, so you can find the bit you half remember without listening to the rest.

  • Fix one sentence without touching the paragraph around it
  • Reads 25 languages, and works out which one it's hearing
  • Teach it the names and jargon it keeps getting wrong

Speakers

Name someone once. Listen knows them next time.

Listen works out who spoke and puts names on the turns. Tell it who someone is once, and it recognises them in the next meeting they turn up in. On a call it never has to guess at your own voice.

  • Works for a room too, with the laptop on the table
  • Fix a whole speaker, one paragraph, or one sentence
  • Voiceprints are biometric data, and yours never leave your Mac

Notes

The Notes tab on a recorded call: your own note, and above it an agent note that links three conversations.

Your notes stay yours.

Write your own notes while the meeting is still running, which is when they're worth the most: “we should upsell them” is the kind of thing no transcript will ever hold. Ask an agent for a summary and it writes a separate one. It can read yours. It cannot change them.

  • No New Note button. Open a recording, click Notes, start typing
  • One note can cover four meetings, and outlive any of them
  • Tag a meeting in your own words, and ask for that tag later

Dictate

Talk anywhere on the Mac, and it types.

Press fn + left shift wherever you're typing, say what you want written, and press it again. The words land where the cursor is, in an email, in Slack, in a search bar, and on the clipboard as well.

  • The same model, and the same vocabulary, your meetings use
  • On macOS 26, an optional pass that drops the ums
  • Needs Accessibility. Recording meetings never does, so it never asks

Your devices

Start on one Mac, pick up on the other.

Turn on sync and your transcripts, notes, people and tags follow you between Macs, through your own private iCloud rather than anybody's server. Listen seals all of it on the device first, with a key Apple never holds. There's nothing to pair and no code to scan.

  • The audio travels too. An hour of meeting is about 61 MB
  • No device deletes its copy until another one has it
  • Anything a sync removes is kept for fourteen days

Works with

Listen records the audio your Mac is already playing, so it needs nothing from the app on the other end. That includes the ones no notetaker bot can reach.

WhatsAppTelegramSignalFaceTimeZoomGoogle MeetMicrosoft TeamsSlack huddlesDiscord

And anything else that makes sound on your Mac.

The iPhone app is in TestFlight. It records the conversations that happen in a room rather than on a call, transcribes and separates the voices on the phone itself, and writes into the same memory: a name your Mac already knows arrives with the turns. The Mac keeps the heavier transcription model, the calendar and the MCP server. Join the beta →

Trust

A memory this personal should be yours.

There is no Listen server, so there is nothing to breach and nothing to hand over. Your meetings are saved on your own computer, and the recording, the transcript and the names on it are all made there. No account, and none of it ever reports back: the only statistics are anonymous counts, turned off in Settings whenever you like, and public in their entirety.

  • Nothing is kept without you knowing. Listen asks on screen the moment it starts, and “No” deletes the audio. Say never once and it stops asking about that app at all. Between calls it is watching for a call to start, not listening to the room.
  • The memory is yours to correct. Every detail it learns carries the sentence it came from, so a wrong one is visible rather than buried, and it can be edited, retired or deleted. Building it is off until you turn it on.
  • It works with the Wi-Fi off. None of it waits on a connection, so losing the network does not cost you the meeting.
  • Your recordings are ordinary files. A folder you own, that you can move, back up or delete. There is nothing to export, because nothing was ever taken.
  • Keep everything, for as long as you like. Your library is a folder on a disk you already own, so no history expires and nothing is held back to be unlocked later.

Three things can send anything out, and each is off until you turn it on: keeping your library in step across your own devices, putting a question to a hosted model, and building the memory, which reads passages to whichever model you point it at. Listen seals anything that travels before it leaves the device, with a key we never hold, so there is nothing readable at the far end. Point all three at a model running on your own Mac and none of it leaves the machine at all.

None of which has to be taken on trust. Listen ships a machine-readable list of every connection it is allowed to make, inside the app, which firewall tools like Little Snitch read straight out of it. Point one at Listen and watch. What runs where sets out each connection and how to check it yourself, and there are answers ready for a privacy or HIPAA review.

Somewhere with rules about this? Listen can be locked down centrally through the same device profiles an IT team already uses: sync off, questions answered only by a model on the machine, no dictation history, backups pointed wherever policy says. Deploying under HIPAA or GDPR has the detail.

Where it sits

What kind of memory do you want?

Categories rather than named products, because naming one dates this table the week they ship something. Check any row against the tool you actually use.

A meeting summariser A notes app Memory inside one AI Listen
Starts from real conversationsYesOnly what you typeOnly what you tell itYes
Carries people and projects forwardRarelyBy handInside that one vendorYes
Links a claim to what was saidSometimesSometimesRarelyYes, every one
You can correct what it learnedLimitedYesLimitedYes
Readable by the AI you chooseLimitedVariesUsually notIn the app, and over MCP
Runs without a vendor serverNoVariesNoYes

Every row is a claim about a category, not about a named product, and is worth re-checking against whatever you are comparing it with.

Who it is for

Conversations that cannot go to a server.

Some work is sold by the hour of attention, and some rules out a meeting bot before anybody has read the pricing. Either way this was built for you rather than adapted to you.

Coaches and consultants They booked your attention. Spend the hour on them, not on your notebook. Therapists and counsellors Be with the client. The session is written up by the time you finish. Lawyers A record of the call with no third party holding it, and nothing for anyone else to produce. Doctors and clinicians No business associate agreement to chase, because there is nobody to sign one with. Journalists Interviews transcribed on your own laptop, with the network off if you want. HR and investigations One copy of the interview, on one machine, with an access log beside it.

From people using it

What it is actually for.

I’ve tested many similar apps out there, and Listen is finally the one that stuck. I love owning my data, and the dictation is my daily driver.

Daniel AndradeFounder, VitalTrends

Get Listen

Build the memory you wish every AI already had.

Download it, record one conversation, name the people in it, then ask what was said. The memory grows from there. Recording is free for ever; what it costs has the rest. Apple silicon, macOS 14 or later, and the speech model is about 2.5 GB the first time you run it.

Download for macOS

Prefer Homebrew? brew install --cask mugoosse/tap/listen