Meetings

Transcription and speaker labels

Sloth transcribes meetings with speech models that run on your Mac, so your audio is never uploaded for transcription. Your voice is labelled “You”; the other side is split into “Speaker 1”, “Speaker 2” and so on.

On-device models

Meeting transcription only offers models you've downloaded to your Mac. There is no cloud option for meetings.

During setup Sloth downloads a recommended model, Parakeet Unified (English, about 565 MB), in the background and uses it for dictation and meetings. Settings › Models lists the others, including:

ModelSizeGood for
Parakeet Unified~565 MBEnglish
Parakeet v3~450 MB25 languages
Whisper (Tiny, Small, Medium, Large Turbo)~153 MB to ~1.5 GBEnglish-only or multilingual variants
Nemotron 3.5 Multilingual~665 MBLive text in more than 100 locales
Cohere Transcribe~3.8 GBDifficult accents and audio, 14 languages
Apple SpeechManaged by macOSmacOS 26; Apple's on-device model

Pick the model for meetings in Settings › Meetings › Transcription › Final transcript. Models download the first time you choose them, from Hugging Face or Muesli's model mirror. After that they run offline.

Speaker labels

Sloth knows which audio came from your microphone and which came from the call, so labelling works without any voice training:

  • Everything from your microphone is labelled You.
  • After the meeting, Sloth separates the voices in the call audio and numbers them in the order they first speak: Speaker 1, Speaker 2, and so on.
  • If Sloth can't separate the voices, the call side is labelled Others.

Each transcript line has a timestamp and a label, for example [00:04:12] Speaker 2: Let's move the launch.

Live transcript

By default the transcript fills in as each stretch of speech is finished. For text as people talk, choose a model in Settings › Meetings › Transcription › Live transcript model. Depending on the model, it either adds a low-latency preview or produces both the live and the final transcript. Set it to Off to go back.

Hover over the floating indicator during a meeting to read the recent transcript.

Where the audio goes

  • While recording, audio is written to temporary files on your Mac. Leftover temporary audio is cleaned up the next time Sloth starts.
  • Sloth keeps a recording only if you ask it to. Settings › Meetings › Recording › Save meeting recording offers Never (the default), Ask every time and Always.
  • Saved recordings go to ~/Library/Application Support/Sloth/meeting-recordings/, as M4A (smaller) or WAV (lossless). Choose in Recording format.
  • The transcript is stored in Sloth's database on your Mac. With the Sloth folder on (the default), it's also written to the transcripts/ folder.