Lark

What it is

Lark is a free Mac dictation app that also records and transcribes your meetings, entirely on your own machine.

Press a key, talk, and your words appear in whatever text field you were in. No audio leaves the computer, and there is no account, no subscription and no cloud.

What I did

I wanted a meeting recorder, and built one into a dictation app.

Lark is a fork of the open-source Handy app by CJ Pais, which is MIT licensed. The transcription pipeline is Handy's. The meeting recorder, the reliability work and the interface changes are the fork.

The first version was built in a single session with Claude on 2026-06-10. It was published on 2026-07-28 as a public, MIT-licensed repository on GitHub.

How it works

Dictation

Lark is a native Rust and Tauri app that sits in the macOS menu bar. Tap a hotkey to start and tap again to stop.

Transcription runs on the Mac itself, on NVIDIA's Parakeet V3 model, which takes about 640 MB on disk. The text is pasted straight into the app you were in.

Meetings

Lark watches which processes hold the microphone, checking every two seconds. When a known meeting app takes it, a card appears offering to record. It never starts without being asked, and it never joins the call.

A meeting is recorded as two tracks: your microphone, and the other side of the call through a macOS system audio tap. When you stop, each track is transcribed and the two are interleaved into one timestamped Markdown file.

The meeting features need macOS 14.2 or later on Apple silicon, because the system audio taps they rely on do not exist before 14.2.

Decisions that shaped it

The start chime only plays once real audio arrives, not on digital silence, so the sound means the mic is genuinely hearing you. A silent stream is restarted automatically after 2.5 seconds.

A broken Bluetooth stream once produced 523 seconds of samples inside a 310-second recording. Tracks are now corrected back to wall-clock length, so the two meeting tracks stay aligned.

When the mic hears the speakers, the same line could land in the transcript twice. Cross-track deduplication stops that.

Meeting mode was validated on real calls, including an 81-minute meeting.

What it does not do yet

Meeting mode was built as a spike and has been in daily use since. Daily use is not the same as hardened.

The meeting transcript labels your side with the name "Kole". It should be a setting, and it is not yet.

There is no download to install. Building it yourself is the only way to get it, and the bundled signing identity is a self-signed certificate nobody else has, so a clean clone will not build until you change it.