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Live transcription shows the transcript building in real time while you record. Words appear on screen as people speak, processed entirely on your Mac. It runs on the Parakeet engine (the default on macOS), so there is nothing to enable — start a recording and the live transcript appears.

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How it works

While recording, Steno feeds audio through voice-activity detection and the Parakeet model to produce a running transcript. When you stop, the same recording is finalized into the saved transcript that your notes are built from. The live view is a convenience during the meeting; the saved transcript is the source of record. When the model is still loading at the start of a recording, Steno shows that it is warming up while audio continues to be captured — nothing is lost.

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Engine requirements

Live transcription is available when the Parakeet engine is active (Settings → Transcribe). If you switch to the Whisper engine, recordings transcribe after you stop rather than live. See Transcription models for the difference between the two engines.
When you stop recording, Steno finalizes the recording into the saved transcript under ~/Library/Application Support/stenoai/transcripts/, and your notes are generated from it. The live view is what you see during the meeting.
No. Live transcription runs entirely on your Mac, the same as the rest of Steno’s on-device pipeline.