Flit 1.5: transcribe a recording on your Mac

The Transcribe tab is in Settings, under Activity. It takes audio and video that macOS can play: MP3, M4A, WAV, AIFF, FLAC, MP4 and MOV among them. A video is read for its sound, and nothing is done with the picture.

1. 01 Right-click the Flit icon in the menu bar and choose Settings…, then Transcribe in the sidebar.
2. 02 Drop a recording on the tab, or click Choose File and pick one.
3. 03 The file is shown with its length. Click Transcribe.
4. 04 The text appears as each piece finishes. When it is done, click Copy.

The first transcript uses the voice model you dictate with, so there is nothing more to download.

You do not have to open Settings first. Each of these opens the tab for you, so you can watch the text arrive.

• Drop it on the Flit icon in the menu bar. The job starts at once.
• Right-click the file in Finder and choose Services → Transcribe with Flit. The job starts at once.
• Open it with Flit: right-click the file, choose Open With, then Flit. The job starts at once.
• Right-click the Flit icon and choose Transcribe File…. A file picker comes up, and the tab opens with the file ready, so you can change the model or the formatting before you click Transcribe.

Select several recordings and they run one after another.

The card shows how far into the recording Flit is and about how long is left, with the transcript so far under it. Stop ends the job. A file you add while one is running waits in line and starts by itself, and the card says which is next.

You can close Settings and keep working. The Flit icon in the menu bar wears a ring that fills as the job goes, and its menu shows the file name and the percentage. If Flit is in the background when the transcript is ready, a notification says so. Click it to open the transcript.

The first time a transcript finishes in the background, macOS asks whether Flit may send notifications.

A finished transcript shows its length, word count, voice model and formatting level on top, and the text in paragraphs. A new paragraph starts where the speaker paused for two seconds or more.

• Copy puts the text on the clipboard.
• Export saves it as Text, Markdown, SRT subtitles or VTT subtitles. The subtitle files carry timestamps, one line per sentence.
• Show in Finder opens the folder with the text file Flit saved for you.
• Transcribe Another clears the card for the next recording. The transcript stays in the list below.

Under the title is a switch with two sides. The left side is the formatting level the transcript was made at, Clean or Polished. The right side is Raw: what the voice model heard, with every hesitation and false start left in.

Use it to check a sentence that reads oddly, or when you want the words exactly as spoken. Copy takes whichever side is showing. The saved text file and the exports stay the formatted transcript.

The switch is hidden when the two would read the same, as they do for a transcript made at Verbatim. Transcripts made before this update have no raw text to show.

Three options sit under the card, and Flit remembers them. They are separate from your dictation settings, so you can dictate with a fast model and transcribe recordings with an accurate one.

• Model is the voice model for files. Only models you have already downloaded are listed. To add one, open Models in the sidebar.
• Formatting is how far Flit tidies the text. Verbatim keeps every word. Clean takes out the hesitations and writes times and numbers properly, with no wait. Polished runs the formatting model over every paragraph so the recording reads as prose.
• Save to is the folder every finished transcript is written to as a text file. It starts as Documents → Flit Transcripts. Click Choose Folder to change it.

On an Apple silicon Mac with Cohere Transcribe, a two-hour recording took about three and a half minutes at Clean in our tests, and about fifteen at Polished.

Every transcript you make is kept under Transcripts at the bottom of the tab, newest first. Click one to open it again, with the same Copy, Export and raw switch. Once you have more than five, a search field appears above the list. It looks in the names and in the text.

The bin on a row deletes that transcript from Flit. The text file in your folder is yours and is left where it is.

The same transcriber is a command, for a folder of recordings or a script. Install it once and flit works in every Terminal window.

1. 01 Open Settings → Transcribe and find Command under Terminal.
2. 02 Click Install. On a Mac with Homebrew that is all. On a Mac without it, macOS asks for your password once.
3. 03 Open a new Terminal window and type the line shown under the button.

flit transcribe meeting.m4a

flit transcribe meeting.m4a --formatting clean --out ~/Transcripts --srt

• The transcript is printed, and the last line gives the speed and the word count.
• --formatting takes verbatim, clean or polished.
• --out names a folder to write the transcript to as a text file.
• --srt and --vtt write subtitles to that folder as well, and --md writes Markdown in place of the text file.
• --model and --language choose the voice model and the language of the recording.
• flit help lists all of it, and flit version says which Flit the command belongs to.

If another tool on your Mac already answers to flit, as a Python packaging tool of that name does, nothing of yours is replaced: the command is installed as flit-app, and the row says so. Remove takes it away again. The command follows the app, so moving or updating Flit does not break it.

A transcript is one flow of text. Flit does not say who said what, and it does not record a meeting as it happens: you hand it a recording you already have. Both speaker labels and meeting recording are planned, and both will run on your Mac like everything else.