A macOS menu-bar widget that continuously transcribes your microphone and system audio to plain-text log files under ~/Documents/al/. On-device via sherpa-onnx (Silero VAD + Parakeet TDT ASR); nothing leaves the machine.

• Two independent capture streams (mic via AVAudioEngine, system audio via ScreenCaptureKit) each run through RNNoise noise suppression.
• Each stream's audio is resampled to 16 kHz and fed to a per-stream Silero VAD (ONNX). Silero emits speech segments after ~500 ms of post-speech silence.
• Each speech segment is transcribed by NeMo Parakeet TDT 0.6B v3 int8 (ONNX, CPU, English-only, ~600 MB unpacked).
• Each transcribed segment is appended as one line to the current log file.
• If more than 5 minutes have elapsed since the last line, a new file is opened named after the new segment's start time.
• Both streams interleave into the same file by arrival order.

LIVETRANSLATE_SIGN_IDENTITY=LiveTranslateDev ./build.sh  # downloads models, builds, bundles, signs
open build/Al.app                                        # launch (always via open, not direct exec)

build.sh calls tools/download-sherpa.sh first — that script downloads the sherpa-onnx dylibs (~50 MB) and models (~470 MB, mostly Parakeet) idempotently. Pass --force to re-download.

The build script reuses LiveTranslate's signing-identity env var. Al's bundle ID (local.mtib.al) is distinct from LiveTranslate's, so each app gets its own TCC grants. If you don't have a LiveTranslateDev cert yet, create one in Keychain Access → Certificate Assistant → Self-Signed Root → Code Signing, name LiveTranslateDev.

Click the ear icon in the menu bar — a popover appears with:

Plain text. No timestamps in the body (the filename is the timestamp). No source tag. Both mic and system audio interleave by arrival time.

ASR segments arriving within 3 seconds of each other are space-joined on the same line. A new line starts when there is a gap longer than 3 seconds. A new file opens after 5 minutes of silence.

Filename: ~/Documents/al/yyyy-MM-dd/yyyy-MM-ddTHH-mm-ss.txt — local time, colons replaced with dashes for shell/CLI compatibility.

On first Start, macOS prompts for:

• Microphone — mic transcription
• Screen Recording — system audio capture via ScreenCaptureKit (no video frames are retained)

Both prompts use the usage descriptions from Info.plist. Grants persist across rebuilds when LIVETRANSLATE_SIGN_IDENTITY is set (TCC keys on certificate identity, not binary hash).

Reset grants:

tccutil reset Microphone local.mtib.al
tccutil reset ScreenCapture local.mtib.al

tail -f /tmp/al.log                                      # real-time internal log
ls -la ~/Documents/al/                                            # output folders by date
find ~/Documents/al -name '*.txt' | xargs tail -5                 # recent transcriptions
ps -o rss,command -p $(pgrep -f 'build/Al.app')         # memory usage (~300 MB expected)
pkill -f 'build/Al.app/Contents/MacOS/Al'               # force-quit

• Mic: auto-restarts the AVAudioEngine on AVAudioEngineConfigurationChange (device swap, AirPods connect, etc.) with a 200 ms debounce.
• System audio: reconnects SCStream on didStopWithError with exponential backoff (1 → 2 → 4 → … → 30 s). Failure counter resets on first healthy sample.
• Crosstalk suppression: mic samples are zeroed when system audio RMS exceeds threshold within the last 250 ms.
• Hourly heartbeat: logs resident memory to /tmp/al.log so long-run memory growth is visible.