bee-recorder 0.1.0b3

Local-first meeting recorder with AI transcription and speaker diarization

Bee Recorder

Local-first meeting recorder for Linux. Captures system audio (Google Meet, Teams, Zoom, Discord, etc.) and your microphone in parallel, then transcribes everything with Whisper and identifies who said what with SpeechBrain — all on your machine. No audio leaves your computer, no API keys, no HuggingFace token.

The product is the transcript itself: a Markdown file you can read and a JSON file you can feed to any LLM later for analysis.

Features

• Fully local — Whisper for transcription, SpeechBrain ECAPA-TDNN for speaker diarization. Nothing uploaded.
• Zero-friction setup — bee setup detects your hardware (RAM, GPU) and picks a Whisper model that will run well, then downloads it (~1.6 GB).
• Channel-aware diarization — microphone audio is diarized into Mic_00, Mic_01, ... (works for in-person meetings where multiple people share one mic), and remote participants from system audio are diarized into Speaker_00, Speaker_01, ...
• Interactive labeling — after processing, Bee shows representative quotes per speaker so you can match Mic_00/Speaker_00 to real names.
• Two outputs per recording — <id>.md (human-readable) and <id>.json (structured for automation/LLM consumption).
• Auto language detection — works out of the box in any language Whisper supports.

Requirements

• Linux with PulseAudio or PipeWire (Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, Arch, Mint, Pop!_OS, etc.)
• Python 3.10+
• ffmpeg and pulseaudio-utils (for pactl)

# Ubuntu / Debian
sudo apt install ffmpeg pulseaudio-utils python3 python3-venv

# Fedora
sudo dnf install ffmpeg-free pulseaudio-utils python3

# Arch
sudo pacman -S ffmpeg libpulse python

macOS and Windows are not supported today (the audio capture layer relies on PulseAudio/PipeWire).

Install

pipx install bee-recorder
bee setup       # detects hardware, downloads Whisper + SpeechBrain models
bee doctor      # verifies ffmpeg, audio server, models, config

Or with plain pip inside a venv:

python3 -m venv ~/.venvs/bee
~/.venvs/bee/bin/pip install bee-recorder
~/.venvs/bee/bin/bee setup

Recording a meeting

1. Start the recording before joining

bee start -n weekly-2026-05-08

The name is optional — without -n, Bee uses a timestamp ID. Add --no-mic if you want to capture only the system audio.

2. Join the meeting normally

Bee runs in the background and captures whatever your audio output and microphone produce. It auto-detects new audio sinks during the call (e.g. you plug in AirPods mid-meeting), so you don't need to restart anything.

3. Stop and process

bee stop

This stops the capture and runs:

1. Whisper transcription (mic + system audio)
2. SpeechBrain diarization on both audio streams (mic + system)
3. Merging — mic speakers become Mic_XX, remote participants become Speaker_XX

How long it takes depends on the meeting length and your hardware. With a CPU and the medium model, expect roughly 0.5–1× real time (a 30-minute meeting takes 15–30 minutes to process). With a GPU, much faster.

If you want to stop now and process later:

bee stop --no-process
bee process weekly-2026-05-08    # transcribe + diarize on demand

4. Label the participants

After processing, Bee prints a table of representative quotes per speaker. To re-print it any time:

bee speakers weekly-2026-05-08

Then assign real names:

bee label weekly-2026-05-08 Mic_00="Alice" Speaker_00="Bob (Acme Corp)" Speaker_01="Carol (Acme Corp)"

The label rewrites both the JSON and Markdown transcripts in place.

5. Read or share the transcript

bee show weekly-2026-05-08       # prints metadata + transcript
bee show weekly-2026-05-08 -t    # transcript only
bee list                          # all recordings

Output files

Transcripts are written to ~/Documents/bee/transcripts/ by default (configurable):

File	Contents
<id>.md	Human-readable transcript with timestamps and speaker labels
<id>.json	Structured transcript with metadata header (duration, language, speakers, segments) for automation and LLM consumption

Raw audio (mic.wav, system.wav) and a metadata.json are kept under ~/Documents/bee/recordings/<id>/ so you can re-process a recording any time with bee process <id>.

Optional: AI summary

Bee does not generate summaries by default — the transcript is the deliverable. If you want a quick summary, the summarize command shells out to the Claude Code CLI (must be installed and authenticated separately):

bee summarize ~/Documents/bee/transcripts/weekly-2026-05-08.md

This produces weekly-2026-05-08_summary.md next to the transcript.

For richer analyses (action items, sentiment, decisions), feed the JSON transcript into your LLM of choice. The structured format is designed for that.

Command reference

Command	What it does
bee start -n <name>	Start recording
bee start --no-mic	Capture system audio only
bee stop	Stop and process (transcribe + diarize + ask to label)
bee stop --no-process	Just stop the recording
bee stop --no-diarize	Skip diarization (faster, no speaker labels)
bee stop --no-identify	Don't prompt for participant names interactively
bee process <id>	(Re)process a stopped recording
bee speakers <id>	Show preview quotes per detected speaker
bee label <id> SPEAKER_00=Name ...	Rename speakers in a transcript
bee show <id>	Print transcript and metadata
bee list	List all recordings
bee summarize <file>	Generate a Claude summary (requires Claude CLI)
bee watch	Watch the transcripts folder and auto-summarize new files
bee setup	First-time setup: hardware detection + model download
bee doctor	Health check (ffmpeg, audio server, models, config)
bee models list	Show available and installed models
bee models download <name>	Download a specific Whisper or diarization model
bee models usage	Show disk usage of downloaded models

Configuration

Bee stores its config at ~/.config/bee/config.toml. Defaults are written by bee setup:

[whisper]
model = "medium"        # tiny, base, small, medium, large-v3
device = "auto"         # auto, cpu, cuda
language = "auto"       # auto-detect, or "pt", "en", "es", ...

[audio]
sample_rate = 16000
channels = 1

You can change the model later (bee models download large-v3 and edit the config), or change the language to skip detection. Run bee doctor after editing.

Privacy

Everything runs locally. Audio files, transcripts, and models all live on your disk. The only network traffic is the initial model download from HuggingFace (anonymous, no token required) when you run bee setup.

License

MIT