macOS menu-bar app

Your meetings,
printed to text.

Heliotype records the call without a bot joining it, names the recording from your calendar, and drops a speaker-labeled transcript right beside it — transcribed under your own key, on your own disk.

Download for macOS Apple Silicon · 14-day trial · $29 launch

How it works

Three steps, no platform to log into.

01

Record without a bot

One click in the menu bar captures both sides — the room through a CoreAudio process tap, you through the mic. Nothing joins the participant list, and no screen-recording indicator turns on.

02

Named from your calendar

On stop, the recording is auto-named after the meeting on your calendar — ACME-Q3Kickoff-20260715-1000.m4a — read locally through macOS Calendar. No tab-hunting to figure out which call this was.

03

Speaker-labeled text, beside it

A diarized transcript is written as a plain .txt next to the recording — clean text you can read, search, or hand straight to Claude or ChatGPT.

ACME-Q3Kickoff-20260715-1000.txt

[0:00:04] Speaker A: Can everyone hear me okay?
[0:00:07] Speaker B: Yep, loud and clear.
[0:00:11] Speaker A: Good. Let's get started — this is the Q3 kickoff, so I want to leave with goals and owners locked.
[0:00:21] Speaker B: Works for me. Can we take the rollout timeline first?

A closer look

The whole loop, in three screens.

Recording

One click. The menu bar shows a live timer, so it's obvious to you — and only you — that the meeting is being captured.

Named, automatically

Stop, and the recording and its transcript are already named after the calendar event — sitting in your folder, not a queue.

Clean text, ready for your AI

Timestamped, speaker-labeled, plain text. Drag it into Claude or ChatGPT and ask what you committed to. Heliotype's job stops at clean input.

Pricing

Pay once. Bring your own key.

No subscription, no meters after purchase. Heliotype carries zero cost per hour of audio because your own transcription key pays for inference — so we don't have to mark it up or ration it.

$29 $39 Launch price

One-time license · 14-day full trial · sold through Lemon Squeezy (handles EU VAT & US sales tax).

  • One-time payment. $29 during launch, $39 list. No recurring charge, no per-minute meter.
  • Bring your own AssemblyAI key. You sign up with AssemblyAI and paste your key once. Transcription bills to you, directly, at their rate — roughly $0.15–0.27 per hour of audio, diarization included.
  • Free credit goes a long way. New AssemblyAI accounts start with about $50 in credit — near 185 hours of meetings — before you pay them anything.
  • Nothing to Heliotype after purchase. No account, no server, no clawback. You buy the app; you own the app.
Download Heliotype — $29

Apple Silicon · macOS 13+ to transcribe, macOS 15+ to record · 14-day trial · 16 MB DMG

Privacy

Exactly one thing leaves your Mac.

Heliotype has no server of its own. There's no account, no sign-in, no telemetry, and no analytics. Here is the whole data story.

What leaves, and when

  • The extracted mono audio track of a recording you chose to transcribe — nothing else.
  • Only at transcription time, the moment you trigger a transcript. Never during recording, never in the background.
  • Sent over HTTPS to AssemblyAI, the transcription service, authenticated with your own key.

What never leaves

  • The screen — it is never captured. The raw video — never uploaded. Only the audio track goes.
  • Your recordings, transcripts, and calendar lookups — all stay on the Mac.
  • Your API key lives in the login Keychain, not a config file or a log.
  • No account, no telemetry, no analytics, no crash reporting.

The full privacy story →

FAQ

Questions worth answering up front.

On first launch macOS says the app can't be opened. Is that normal?

Yes — for now. The v1.0 build is signed with a self-signed certificate rather than a notarized one, so on macOS 15 (Sequoia) the first launch is blocked. It's a one-time step:

  1. Double-click Heliotype. macOS refuses and offers only Done and Move to Trash — click Done (do not Move to Trash).
  2. Open System Settings → Privacy & Security.
  3. Scroll to Security. Next to "Heliotype was blocked," click Open Anyway, then confirm once.

On macOS 14 and earlier, right-click the app ▸ Open works instead. Developer-ID notarization — which removes this step entirely — is on the roadmap.

What are the requirements?

Apple Silicon (arm64) Mac. Menu-bar meeting recording needs macOS 15 or newer, because it relies on the modern CoreAudio process-tap API. Transcribing existing audio or video files — the Finder right-click and the menu-bar picker — works on macOS 13 or newer. It's a direct-download signed DMG; Heliotype is not on the Mac App Store.

Why cloud transcription instead of on-device?

Today, transcription runs on AssemblyAI's cloud — that's what produces the accurate, speaker-diarized text under your own key. Only the extracted mono audio track is ever sent, and only when you ask for a transcript.

A fully local, on-device engine is the number-one item on the roadmap. The engine layer is swappable by design, so a local option will drop in for people who want zero data to leave the Mac at all — without changing anything else about how Heliotype works.

Does a bot join my meeting, or does anyone see it recording?

No. Heliotype captures system audio and your microphone locally on your Mac. Nothing joins the participant list, and because the screen is never captured, no purple screen-sharing indicator appears. The meeting is unchanged for everyone else on the call.

All questions, answered →

Updates

Hear when something ships.

One email when something ships. No other use.