Parrot is a free, open-source meeting recorder for the Mac with a live copilot that reads from a user's own documents, and it does the transcription on the device: Reveneau

Parrot is a free, open-source meeting recorder for the Mac with a live copilot that reads from a user's own documents, and it does the transcription on the device

A London-based developer, Uygar Turkantekin, released Parrot 0.25.0 on 30 September 2026, a free and open-source Mac meeting recorder with a live copilot that answers from a user's own documents. Transcription and speaker detection run on the device; the project has 70 stars on GitHub and 25 points on a Show HN post the same day.

Why it mattersA working person on a call now has a private alternative to Otter, Fireflies and Read.ai that they can install for free and audit line by line, without a bot joining the call and without audio leaving the machine.

A working person on a call spends most of it half-listening, because the other half is spent typing what somebody said. The paid options for handing that off, Otter, Fireflies, Read.ai and Granola, run in the cloud and send a bot to the call. On 30 September 2026 a London-based developer, Uygar Turkantekin, released Parrot 0.25.0, a free and open-source Mac app that records the call locally, transcribes it on the device, and answers from the user's own documents during the meeting.

What it does

Parrot listens to what a Mac already hears, so no bot joins the call. Transcription runs on the device with WhisperKit, and speaker detection is local by default. The copilot reads from files a user has uploaded, in PDF, Markdown or plain text, and suggests an answer with a citation while the call is running. After the call, Parrot writes a report and offers coaching notes.

The AI provider is a user choice: the copilot can call Claude, run against a local Ollama model, or use another provider. Turkantekin writes on the Show HN post that "Parrot records what your Mac hears and everything stays in your computer if you use local models, no account, no API calls".

The numbers, as of publication

Parrot's GitHub repository at turantekin/Parrot has 70 stars and 18 forks, under GPL-3.0 for the current release. Earlier releases up to 0.11.3 were MIT-licensed, so a downstream project that needs the older licence can still fork from that tag. The Show HN post at news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49910328 was posted about six hours before this piece and carries 25 points and 9 comments. Turkantekin says this is his first open-source project.

The app requires macOS 14 or later on an Apple Silicon Mac; there is no Intel, Windows or Linux build. The current release is 0.25.0.

What is not solved yet

Comments on the Show HN thread flag an echo issue on some recordings, ask for a Markdown export, and question how the app handles the audio of remote meeting participants when it only records what the Mac speaker plays. None of these are fatal to the concept, and they are the shape of feedback a first release invites, but a team that would deploy this to everyone in the company will want each of them fixed and the answers written down.

The privacy claim also lands only if a user does actually pick a local model. Choosing Claude sends the transcript to Anthropic, and the app makes that choice visible but does not stop it.

Source

Parrot, openparrot.app, 30 September 2026
Parrot on GitHub, turantekin/Parrot, release v0.25.0
Show HN: Parrot, Hacker News, 30 September 2026

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