Parrot

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🦜 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.*

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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.

🤝 Use your meetings in Claude

Free, no meeting bot, no 30-day limit, and your meetings stay on your Mac until you ask. Connect Claude Desktop in one click (or Claude Code, Codex for ChatGPT plans, or Cursor) and your own plan does the thinking: *"What did I promise last week?"*, *"Brief me for my call with Acme"*, *"Draft the follow-up for this morning's call"*, *"Coach me across my last 10 calls"*. Claude gets real speaker names, long transcripts in pages, promises with their owners, talk time, and four ready-made actions in its + menu (weekly digest, follow-up email, prep for a call, PRD from calls). It can't change your meetings: you choose what it sees (transcripts, reports, notes, Assistant cards, whole call types), on-device-only meetings are never shown, and Parrot tells you how often it was read. The one thing it can send back is a suggested profile, which waits for your review. Open Claude & AI Apps in the sidebar. How it works.

🎭 Call profiles: one app, every kind of call

Tell Parrot what kind of call it is, and the profile decides what the Assistant watches for and how the report is written.

• Eight built-ins: Default, Sales discovery, 1:1 coaching, Interview, Customer support, Vendor call, Investor pitch, Generic. Sales looks for objections and buying signals; Interview for follow-ups and red flags; a 1:1 gets reflections and open questions.
• A report of its own: each profile shapes the report after its calls. Sections in your own words, as bullets or paragraphs; a scorecard that scores criteria from 1 to 5, each with the moment that shows it; which section holds promises; and whether to coach. A sales report asks about budget, who decides and timeline; an interview gets a scorecard.
• Make your own: name it, say who the other side is, write a persona and rules, choose which documents it uses, add your own card types (with color, icon, "keep on screen until handled") and gauges.
• Share it: export a .parrotprofile for a colleague, or import theirs. Parrot shows every change before it applies one, and a file can switch on-device only on, never off. The last five versions of each profile are kept, one click to restore.
• Let Claude tune it: Claude can read your recent calls and suggest a better profile. It lands in Parrot for you to review: Apply, Save as new, or Discard.

🗣️ Speaker names: names, not "Speaker 2"

• Me vs Them is exact, live: your mic and the call audio are separate tracks.
• After the call, on-device speaker detection (FluidAudio, a 13 MB model) tells the voices on the other side apart.
• Name a voice once from short clips and every line takes the name. Pick from everyone on the invite, names from your past calls, or type a new one. Reports and coaching use real names. Heard fewer people than were there? Right-click a line, This line is → New speaker….
• Remember voices (opt-in): next call, Parrot asks "sounds like Jeremy?" One click to confirm. With a calendar invite, only people on it are suggested. Voiceprints stay on the Mac; forget one anytime.
• Live speaker labels (experimental, off by default): names the other side *during* the call. "Them" becomes Speaker 1, Speaker 2 within seconds, you can name a voice mid-call, and the end-of-call pass keeps the same labels. It re-checks only the last minute of audio, so a long call costs no more than a short one.
• Got one line wrong? Right-click it and reassign just that line.
• One person split in two? Pick the other voice's name under In this call and they become one person everywhere, older meetings included. Two invitees with the same name stay two people.

📝 The report writes itself, then it coaches you

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