Lectures, with the slides attached

Start a note when the lecture starts, from the menu bar or by double-tapping right Option. Spake records:

• the lecture's audio, from the video or call playing on your Mac, as its own source;
• your voice, from the microphone, as another source, so your asides don't get mixed into the lecturer's words;
• the screen, as an MP4, with stills sampled from it and the text recognized on them.

When you stop, each source gets its own transcript, with speaker labels. They're observations, not verdicts: when Spake isn't sure who spoke, the turn stays Unknown rather than a guess. Name a speaker once and Spake remembers that voice in later notes.

• Play the note back and each word lights up as it's said.
• Search finds a lecture by what was said or by what was on a slide.
• note.md is Markdown, so it goes into Obsidian, a folder of course notes, or anything that reads text.

Spake detects the language from the first 30 seconds and transcribes on your Mac: Parakeet for 25 languages, Whisper for 75 more. If it guesses wrong, pick the language and it transcribes the saved audio again.

Recording a lecture can need permission from the lecturer or the school, and the rules differ by place. Check before you record anything you didn't make. Spake records only what you start and keeps it on your Mac, but whether you may record is up to the people in the room.

• Long lectures cost memory. Identifying speakers in a long recording takes extra memory: on a 19-minute take it peaked near 0.9 GB, and about 300 MB stayed in use afterwards. The three-minute idle release covers the speech engines, not this. macOS can take the speaker models back when it runs short of memory, and quitting Spake frees all of it.
• Screen recordings use real disk space. An hour of screen is an hour of video.
• Apple silicon only, macOS 15 or later. No iPad or iPhone app.

$29 once, up to 3 Macs. 14-day trial with everything on. 30-day refunds. Apple silicon, macOS 15 or later.

What a note is on disk: the note format. What Spake sends over the network, and when: privacy.