Press kit

One line

Cadence turns an audio or video recording into a timestamped transcript that knows who was speaking — entirely on your Mac.

Short description

Cadence is a native macOS transcription app with speaker diarization built in. Drop in an interview, a podcast or a screen recording of a meeting, and read it back as speaker-labelled turns with timecodes instead of a wall of text. Everything runs on the Apple Neural Engine: no account, no upload, and no per-minute billing.

Longer description

Cadence ships five speech engines and lets you choose between them per recording, because accuracy, download size and language coverage pull against each other. Apple Speech is the default and needs no download at all, so the app transcribes on first launch. Parakeet TDT v2 is the most accurate on English; Parakeet TDT v3 covers 25 European languages, with a compact build for when disk is the constraint; Whisper large-v3-turbo handles 100 languages and detects them itself. Each engine keeps its own transcript for a recording, so trying a second one costs nothing.

Speaker diarization runs via pyannote Community-1, a 22 MB download, and is part of the free app rather than a paid add-on. So is playback: a transport under the transcript plays the source file from 0.75× to 2× while the transcript follows along, marking the word as it is spoken and tinting the turn it belongs to. Cadence Pro is a one-time purchase that adds three things: Transcribe All, which works through the whole library; model comparison, which reads two engines side by side with the words they disagree about highlighted; and the full export set of WebVTT, Markdown, JSON and CSV.

Cadence does not record. It reads files you already have. The only network request it makes is fetching a speech model, once.

Fact sheet

Assets

The app icon is available as app-icon.svg (vector, 1024 px artboard) and the mark on its own as logo.svg. Screenshots of the app are on the homepage — the library, the queue, the engine manager and the side-by-side comparison. The welcome screen is below.

What not to write

Cadence has no microphone access and does not record anything — it reads existing files. Please do not describe planned features as shipping ones: search across transcripts, a persistent speaker library, Shortcuts actions and per-recording setting overrides are all roadmap, not release 1.0. Playback with word-level follow-along does ship in 1.0, and it is free.