Everything you say,
kept. On your Mac.
Tonebox records your calls and meetings, transcribes them with Whisper on-device, and turns months of conversations into a searchable, answerable archive. No cloud. No account. Your voice never leaves the machine.
Private beta · macOS 15+ · Apple Silicon & Intel
“…so the way I'd frame the renewal pitch is around the time-to-value story we saw with the Q3 cohort — let's pull those numbers before Friday.”
One session, from capture to answers.
Tonebox treats recording, transcription, summarising, and asking as one continuous workflow — each step feeds the next without you copying anything between apps.
Hotkey-trigger a recording, dictate into any app, or drop in audio you already have. Mic + system audio both work.
Whisper runs on-device with speaker diarisation. CoreML acceleration on Apple Silicon, CPU fallback on Intel.
Auto-summarise sessions into decisions, action items, and follow-ups. Plug your own LLM API in.
Full-text and semantic search across every session, with cited answers — your spoken notes become a knowledge base.
Decision: open New York office this quarter. Marc to confirm the Tuesday sublease by Friday; Renata will brief Atlas on Monday so they hear it from us first.
I want us to leave dinner with one decision — should we open the New York office this quarter or push to Q1?
Pushing buys us a cleaner runway, but we lose the lead we already met with on Tuesday. They were ready to sign a sublease.
Right — and Atlas already cited the New York presence as part of why they renewed. That's a real signal.
A transcript that's actually navigable.
Every session lives in a single document — diarised, summarised, and tied back to the audio it came from. No copy-pasting between Otter, Notion, and Apple Voice Memos.
- Speaker diarisation
Per-session diarisation runs alongside transcription so quotes carry attribution from the start.
- Auto-summary card
Each session gets a structured summary — decisions, action items, owners — refreshed every time the transcript changes.
- Click-to-play timestamps
Jump to any moment in the recording from the transcript line. Bookmark moments live with ⌘⇧M.
Your spoken notes, finally interrogable.
Ask anything across the conversations you've had — meetings, dictation, calls, voice memos. Tonebox answers in plain English with the relevant clips cited underneath.
- Searches across every session
Embedded once, queryable forever. Tonebox keeps a local vector index of your transcripts so answers stay grounded in what was actually said.
- Cited back to the audio
Every answer carries inline citations that link to the exact transcript line and timestamp — auditable, never made-up.
- Bring your own model
Pick the LLM that fits your privacy bar — Claude, GPT, or a local Llama via Ollama. Your audio stays on disk either way.
Built for the way voice work actually flows.
Tonebox isn't a transcription web app with extra buttons — it's a desktop tool that lives next to the apps you already use, with hotkeys, system-wide dictation, and local storage at the core.
Hold a hotkey and speak — Tonebox types into whatever app is focused. Works system-wide.
Record both sides of a Zoom call, the room mic, or both at once. No virtual audio drivers.
⌘⇧M drops a pin during a recording so the moment is one click away in the transcript later.
Auto-named, auto-grouped sessions with project folders, tags, and full-text search across the lot.
Decisions, action items, and follow-ups extracted from each session — re-summarises when you edit.
Local embeddings index every word so you can find clips by meaning, not just keyword.
Drop in audio, PDFs, Word docs, web articles, even YouTube links — everything joins the same searchable library.
Everything lives in a folder on your Mac. No cloud account, no upload, telemetry off by default.
Push extracted tasks to Jira, or let your AI agents query the library over MCP. Your archive works for you.
Local-first, by construction.
Voice work is some of the most sensitive content you produce — calls with customers, dinners with co-founders, dictation that contains things you haven't even decided yet. Tonebox treats that as the default, not the upgrade.
- • No analytics or telemetry pings unless you opt in.
- • No account, no email, no login wall.
- • No background uploads. The app works fully offline.
- • Cloud LLMs are opt-in and per-request — you see exactly what's sent.
Recordings, transcripts, and embeddings live in a folder you can move, back up, or delete. There is no cloud copy, ever.
Transcription is local — Apple Silicon CoreML acceleration, Intel CPU fallback. No audio is shipped to a server to be transcribed.
Want full local? Point the summariser at Ollama. Need quality? Use Claude or GPT with your own API key. We don't proxy your data.
The app is Developer ID-signed and notarized by Apple; your API keys live in the macOS Keychain, never in plaintext files.
Why people pick Tonebox over the alternatives.
We respect the tools below — Otter is great in the browser, Voice Memos is dead simple. Tonebox solves a different problem: keeping your voice work fast, local, and queryable on a single Mac.
| Feature | Tonebox | Otter.ai | Voice Memos | MacWhisper-style apps |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Records on-device | ||||
| Transcribes locally (Whisper) | ||||
| System-wide dictation hotkey | partial | |||
| Speaker diarisation | partial | |||
| Auto-summaries with custom prompts | partial | partial | ||
| Ask across all sessions (RAG) | partial | |||
| Bring-your-own LLM | partial | |||
| No cloud account required | ||||
| Tasks, Jira sync & MCP agents |
- Tonebox
- Otter.ai
- Voice Memos
- MacWhisper-style apps
- Tonebox
- Otter.ai
- Voice Memos
- MacWhisper-style apps
- Tonebox
- Otter.ai
- Voice Memos
- MacWhisper-style appspartial
- Tonebox
- Otter.ai
- Voice Memos
- MacWhisper-style appspartial
- Tonebox
- Otter.aipartial
- Voice Memos
- MacWhisper-style appspartial
- Tonebox
- Otter.aipartial
- Voice Memos
- MacWhisper-style apps
- Tonebox
- Otter.ai
- Voice Memos
- MacWhisper-style appspartial
- Tonebox
- Otter.ai
- Voice Memos
- MacWhisper-style apps
- Tonebox
- Otter.ai
- Voice Memos
- MacWhisper-style apps
Honest answers to the questions we get most.
Anything missing? Reach out at contact and we'll add it.
How do I get Tonebox?
What does it cost?
Do you upload my recordings anywhere?
What runs on-device versus in the cloud?
What hardware do I need?
Can I record both sides of a Zoom or Teams call?
What about Windows or Linux?
Is there an iOS or Android app?
Can my team share recordings?
Your words are worth keeping.
Tonebox is in private early access while we polish the beta with a small group. Leave your email and we'll send your invite — with the signed build and five-minute setup — as seats open up.