If youb�re looking for a hosted desktop recording API, consider checking out Recall.ai, an API that records Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, In-person meetings, and more.

Pensieve is a local-only desktop app for recording meetings, discussions, memos or other audio snippets from locally running applications for you to always go back and review your previous discussions.

It uses a bundled Whisper instance to transcribe the audio locally, and optionally summarizes the transcriptions with an LLM. You can connect a local Ollama instance to be used for summarization, or provide an OpenAI key and have ChatGPT summarize the transcriptions for you.

If you choose Ollama for summarization (or disable summarization entirely), all your data stays on your machine and is never sent to any external service. You can record as many meetings as you want, and manage your data yourself without any external providers involved.

Pensieve automatically registers a tray icon and runs in the background, which makes it easy to start and stop recordings at any time. You can also configure Pensieve in many ways, like customizing which models to use for transcription and summarization, or various audio processing settings.

Pensieve requires FFmpeg and Whisper to be installed on macOS. The easiest way to install these dependencies is using Homebrew:

Prerequisites

1. Install Homebrew (if not already installed):

   /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"
   

2. Install FFmpeg:

   brew install ffmpeg
   

3. Install Whisper:

   brew install whisper-cpp
   

Verification

After installation, verify that both tools are available:

ffmpeg -version
whisper-cpp --help

Alternative Installation Methods

If you prefer not to use Homebrew:

• FFmpeg: Download from https://ffmpeg.org/download.html
• Whisper: Download from https://github.com/ggerganov/whisper.cpp

Troubleshooting

If Pensieve shows warning dialogs about missing dependencies:

1. Ensure the tools are installed and available in your PATH
2. Restart Pensieve after installation
3. Check that the tools are accessible from the terminal

Issue reporting

If you encounter any issues or bugs with Pensieve, please report them as issue. Please provide the log files from your local installation, which is stored in the %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\Pensieve\logs\main.log folder.