谺kodama

Download

kodama is a menu bar app for the Mac. It's free, and everything from recording to export works without signing in.

Coming soon

The first release is being prepared. Once it is out, you can download it from this page.

Requirements

  • macOS 26 or later
  • A Mac with Apple silicon (Macs with Intel processors are not supported)

Picking out names and terms needs Apple Intelligence to be turned on. Without it, recording and transcription work as usual.

Languages

The app is available in 16 languages.

Speech can be transcribed in English, Japanese, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Spanish, French, Portuguese, German and Korean.

Installing

  1. Open the dmg you downloaded.
  2. Drag the kodama icon into the Applications folder.
  3. Open kodama from the Applications folder.

The first launch

On first launch, macOS asks you for three permissions.

Microphone
To take in your voice.
Speech Recognition
To turn speech into text, on your Mac.
System Audio Recording
To take in the sound your Mac plays, such as the other side of a meeting.

On first launch only, macOS also fetches its speech recognition model, and kodama fetches the speaker-separation model (about 40 MB) from Hugging Face. Recording can start once this is done.

Closing the recording window does not quit kodama. It stays in the menu bar. To quit, right-click the kodama icon in the menu bar and choose Quit kodama.

Updates

kodama checks for a new version at launch and every 24 hours. When one is out, it lets you know, and you decide whether to install it. It never interrupts a recording to tell you.

You can turn the check off in Settings.