NotchLive started as live captions: listen to any Mac audio, transcribe it privately on-device, and show the text where your eyes already are. The same engine is also perfect for a quieter job: turning spoken thoughts into notes.
With NotchLive 1.3.0, Pro users get Voice Notes: a dark, focused notepad that opens from the notch, records your microphone, and turns speech into a note you can keep, export, or send to NotchPad.
Speak naturally. Keep the raw transcript when you need accuracy, or switch to AI when you want the note to read cleanly.
Most speech-to-text workflows make you choose a destination first: a document, a note app, a chat field, a meeting recorder. That is useful, but it is also a little heavy when you just want to get a thought out before it disappears.
NotchLive already has the microphone permissions, the on-device Whisper AI models, and the notch UI. Voice Notes keeps the feature small: open Notes, speak, clean up, save. It does not try to become a meeting bot or a full writing suite.
Dictation is messy by nature. Sometimes you want the raw transcript because it preserves exactly what was said. Other times you want the readable version: punctuation, cleaner phrasing, fewer filler words.
Voice Notes keeps both views:
The important part is that the choice stays obvious. There is no hidden rewrite step that makes you wonder what changed.
Voice Notes now has a Saved Notes view in NotchLive Settings, so dictated notes are not trapped in the floating panel. You can review previous notes, copy them, export them as text files, or delete them when they are no longer useful.
If you use NotchPad, there is a direct handoff. Click the NotchPad button and NotchLive sends the current note into NotchPad, then gets out of the way so the two notch panels do not sit on top of each other.
Small but important: NotchPad remains the permanent notebook. NotchLive is the voice capture layer. The apps work together without forcing either app to become bloated.
Voice Notes uses the same privacy model as NotchLive captions. Speech recognition runs on your Mac using Whisper AI through CoreML. Your audio is not sent to a server, and you do not need an account to use the app.
AI cleanup is designed as a lightweight note-polish step, not a cloud meeting archive. The whole experience stays local, fast, and personal.
Live captions remain free forever. Voice Notes, Saved Notes, translation, session recording, session history, and transcript export are part of NotchLive Pro, a one-time purchase of $14.99.
If you already have Pro, update to NotchLive 1.3.0 and open Mode -> Notes. If you are new, download NotchLive and try the free captions first.
macOS 14+ · Live captions free forever · Voice Notes require Pro.