Soufflé

Private speech-to-text for macOS that never leaves your Mac.

Dictate into any app, transcribe meetings with speaker separation, and get on-device summaries
with decisions and action items. No cloud, no accounts, no API keys.

Download · Speech models · Build from source

Everything runs on-device:

• 🔒 Fully private. Transcription, summaries, and audio all stay on your Mac. Nothing is uploaded, and it works offline.
• 🎙️ Dictation and meetings. Talk into any app with a global shortcut and auto-paste, or capture a meeting with a live transcript that tells you apart from everyone else.
• 🧠 Understand and own. On-device summaries with decisions and action items, full-text search, and export to Markdown, JSON, or subtitles.

Transcribe

• Dictation, with auto-paste into whatever app you were using and a global shortcut to start it from anywhere. Apps that reject synthetic paste (terminals, secure fields) can receive simulated keystrokes instead. Optional start/stop sounds confirm the shortcut landed.
• Meeting transcription, with a live transcript and system-audio capture that separates Me from Them. Optional audio recording keeps the meeting sound as compact Opus files with a retention policy, replayable with click-to-seek from the transcript.
• Hands-off recording lifecycle: the app offers to start when a calendar meeting begins, detects when the meeting seems over and stops on its own after warning you, survives lid-close and system sleep by pausing and resuming, and recovers or salvages the session if the engine stalls or the microphone disappears.

Dictate into any app	Your timeline, grouped by day

Understand

• Meeting summaries, generated on-device by Ollama or Apple Intelligence (no setup when Apple Intelligence is available).
• Structured outcomes: decisions, action items with owners, and open questions extracted alongside the summary.
• Dictation polish (optional): a local LLM pass cleans up dictated text with editable prompt templates before pasting.
• Full-text search across every transcript and dictation entry.

Transcript, notes, and participants	On-device summary and outcomes

Own your data

• Export any meeting as Markdown, JSON, or SRT/VTT subtitles, or the whole archive as a plain folder of Markdown and JSON.

• MCP server: the bundled souffle-mcp sidecar lets Claude Desktop, Claude Code or any MCP client search and read your transcripts. Read-only, fully local, works even when the app is closed. Setup snippets live in Settings > Data.

• Headless CLI: souffle --transcribe-file audio.wav --json transcribes a file without launching the app, and --repeat N doubles as a benchmark harness.

  The souffle binary ships inside the app bundle and is not added to your PATH, so it is not a global command. Invoke it by full path, or symlink it once:

  # Run directly
  "/Applications/Soufflé.app/Contents/MacOS/souffle" --list-engines
  
  # Or expose it as a `souffle` command
  ln -s "/Applications/Soufflé.app/Contents/MacOS/souffle" /usr/local/bin/souffle

Speech models

All models run locally and are downloaded on first use from HuggingFace:

• Kyutai STT 1B (default): French + English streaming transcription, ~2.4 GB, Metal GPU via Candle
• Kyutai STT 2.6B: English, higher quality, ~5.6 GB
• Whisper Large V3 Turbo: multilingual, ~1.6 GB, Metal via whisper.cpp
• Parakeet TDT 0.6B v3: 25 languages with punctuation and capitalization, ~670 MB int8, fast CPU inference via ONNX Runtime

Download

Install with Homebrew:

brew install --cask damione1/tap/souffle

Or grab a prebuilt installer from the Releases page: a .dmg for Apple Silicon Macs, requiring macOS 13 or newer.

Build from source

Requires an Apple Silicon Mac, Rust, Node.js 18+, and cmake (brew install cmake).

npm install
npm run tauri dev

License

Copyright (c) 2026 Damien Goehrig.

Released under the GNU General Public License v3.0 or later (GPL-3.0-or-later). You are free to use, study, modify, and redistribute this software, provided that derivative works are also published under the same license. See LICENSE.md for the full text.