🦜 Parrot
A meeting recorder for your Mac with a live AI assistant built in. It records and transcribes every call on your machine, suggests answers from your own documents while you're still talking, and writes the report before you've hung up.
No bot joins your meeting. It works with Google Meet, Zoom, Teams, or anything else your Mac can hear. Transcription, speaker detection and your documents stay on your Mac. The Assistant's brain is your choice: Claude with your own key, any OpenAI-compatible server, or a local model through Ollama, which makes the whole thing free and offline.
https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/76dc07c7-6667-497e-b39f-8218e077c88c
Parrot in 73 seconds. Turn the sound on, or follow the captions.
The live call screen, as drawn on openparrot.app. The other side asked about data residency, and the answer came straight from the FAQ you dropped in.
Hey! 👋
So here's the deal. I'm Uygar, and I'm trying to build my own meeting recorder from scratch. I got tired of paying for services like Otter.ai that send all my conversations to some server I don't control. I thought, "How hard can it be to do this locally on my Mac?" Turns out... it's a journey. 😄
I'm building this with the help of Claude (yes, the AI, we've had a lot of late-night coding sessions together), and honestly, it's been one of the most fun projects I've worked on. It's not perfect yet: there are still bugs I'm chasing, permissions that are being annoying, and features I haven't figured out. But the core works, and it's on every one of my client calls now.
This is a personal project. I'm learning as I go. If there are any crazy coders out there who stumble upon this and want to help improve it, I would really, truly appreciate it. Fixing a bug, improving the speaker detection, or just telling me I'm doing something wrong: all of it helps. Open a PR, open an issue, or just say hi. 🙌
If you find this useful or just think the idea is cool, give it a star. It'll make my day.
Contents
What it does · Privacy: what leaves your Mac · Getting started · Keyboard shortcuts · Tech stack · Build from source · Want to help? · Known issues · Similar projects
What it does
🎯 Live Assistant: help during the call
An always-on assistant that watches the conversation and puts the right thing on screen. No button pressing, the whole call.
- Suggested answers the moment the other side asks something, grounded in your documents, with the file named on the card and a Copy button.
- Pinned cards for objections and open questions. They stay on screen until you handle them, then resolve themselves.
- Next steps captured the moment you promise them ("Promised by you").
- A live call score from 0 to 100, a one-line coach, a mood read, and gauges like Buying temp or You're talking. Your talk share turns orange past 70%.
- Nudges when the call drifts. A short tip over whatever app the call is in, for about ten seconds: "They've gone quiet since you said 'the price goes up in January'." It catches long silences, monologues, talking over them, short answers, speeding up and repeating yourself; with the Assistant on, also a mood shift, a question you didn't answer, and a call wrapping up with no next step. At most one every two minutes, and it's kept out of screen sharing. It reads timing and words, never emotion from anyone's voice. Settings > Assistant > Live Nudges.
- Brief it before the call. A line or two on the dashboard ("Renewal call, legal wants to know where the data is stored") and it knows who you're talking to from the first second. Edit the brief mid-call from the Briefed card.
- You control what it spends. Pace (Fast, Balanced, Relaxed for free tiers), how much conversation each request carries (2, 5 or 10 minutes), and an Assistant switch on the call screen and in the menu bar: off means nothing is sent and nothing is spent, while the recording and transcript keep going.
- Answers from your docs in about half a second (optional, Claude mode): add a TypeSafe AI key and the matching excerpt shows as a From your docs card while Claude is still writing.
📚 Knowledge base: brief it like a new teammate
- Drop in PDFs, text or Markdown: pricing sheets, FAQs, playbooks. They're chunked and embedded on your Mac with Apple's NaturalLanguage framework, plus an exact-word (BM25) index. Nothing is uploaded; only the few passages that match a question go to the AI you picked for the Assistant.
- Sort documents into folders and set Use for once per folder: every call type, a few, or Off to pause it. One document can have its own setting, anything the Assistant can't use says so, and a one-line about tells you (and the Assistant) what's inside.
- Coaching instructions for every call ("keep answers short, always offer three price options").
- Choose whether it may answer from general knowledge when your documents don't cover it. Every card says where its answer came from.
🔎 Ask Parrot: a memory of every call
Chat with all your calls (⌘K): "What did I promise Acme?", then "and what did we offer them?". Chats are saved, follow-ups work, and every fact in the answer is a chip that opens the meeting at that second. Counts like "How many meetings did I have last week?" are worked out exactly on your Mac. Ask Parrot has its own AI choice: search always runs on your Mac, and with Ollama the answer is written there too. It works in English and Turkish, and it's in beta. When a call starts with people you've met before, the live Assistant's brief shows the open items from last time.
This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗
