The lecture keeps talking. You keep working.
A Mac menu-bar recorder for four-hour lectures. It transcribes everything on your laptop, taps you when your name comes up, and when the lecturer asks the room a question, it hands you a sentence to say.
What was said in the room becomes something you can read.
In a lot of lectures the slides don't carry the content. The lecturer does. A lecture happens once, so Nolisen is built around one promise: whatever happens to your laptop, you don't lose what was said.
Crash-safe capture
It saves as it goes. If your laptop crashes, you lose a second, not the lecture.
Turned into text
Right on your laptop, in almost any language, with a sharper mode just for Vietnamese.
Click to hear it
Every line keeps its timestamp. Click one to hear exactly what was said, at 0.75× to 2×.
Ask
One shortcut finds the lecturer's latest question and gives you a sentence to say.
Name alert
A silent notification when a line mentions you. No chime in the lecture hall.
Folders by course
Keep each course in its own folder. Pick it before class, or halfway through.
Pull the plug. See what's left.
Click anywhere on this four-hour lecture to crash the laptop at that moment.
Tested for real: the app was force-quit 10 seconds into a recording, and 9.69 seconds came back.
The recording never leaves your Mac.
There is deliberately no cloud transcription. Sending four hours of a class off the machine should be your decision, not a default.
- The audio. Never uploaded, by any feature.
- Transcripts, made and stored locally.
- Your AI account keys, locked in your Mac's password store.
The last minute or so of what was said goes, as text, to the AI you picked, like Claude or ChatGPT. Never the audio.
Or pick Local LLM, an AI that runs on your own Mac, and nothing leaves at all.
Four hours in a lecture hall, for a participation point and whatever the slides leave out.
My brother and a lot of my friends are still at university. Some of them have spent years sitting through lectures that run all afternoon, where the slides say almost nothing, attendance is graded, and the points come from speaking up when the lecturer asks the room.
Meanwhile there's real work to do: side projects, jobs, the stuff you actually want to be building. So I made the thing I'd want in that seat. It listens to every word so you don't lose any of it, lets you get on with your own work, and gets your attention when your name comes up or a question comes your way.
It won't learn the material for you. But the transcript will be there tonight, with every line a click away from the lecturer's own voice.
Copy, paste, done.
Paste each line into the Terminal app, one at a time. You'll need a Mac from the last few years and Homebrew, a free tool for installing Mac apps.
- 1Install the two free helpers it records and writes text with
$ brew install ffmpeg whisper-cpp - 2Download Nolisen
$ git clone https://github.com/liamlee2110/nolisen.git ~/workspace/nolisen - 3Put it in your Applications folder
$ cd ~/workspace/nolisen && make install - 4Before a lecture that matters, check the mic can hear the room from your seat
$ /Applications/Nolisen.app/Contents/MacOS/Nolisen record 10
It records ten seconds and tells you if the room came through. If the lecturer is too faint from where you sit, move closer. Better to learn that in ten seconds than after four hours.
Free, and open source.
Anyone can read the code, check it does what this page says, and help make it better. Found a bug or have an idea? Open an issue on GitHub.
github.com/liamlee2110/nolisenThe Vietnamese speech mode is free for personal, non-commercial use. Check your university's rules on recording lectures, and ask when in doubt.