# The Apple technology behind your AI meeting notes

URL: https://quietscribe.app/en/technology/

Quiet Scribe is built only with Apple frameworks: Speech transcribes, the on-device Foundation Models write the minutes and Translation translates them. There are no third-party SDKs and no Quiet Scribe servers, so your meetings are processed by your own iPhone, iPad or Mac.

## What it means for you

The technical choices translate into a few plain facts.

- **Your device does the work:** The transcript and the minutes are produced by the chip in your iPhone, iPad or Mac. Your audio is not uploaded to a transcription service.
- **No upload queue:** There is no file to upload and no server queue. Transcription takes roughly half the length of the meeting, and long meetings can take a few minutes more to summarize.
- **Translation without a cloud service:** Translations are made on your device by Apple's Translation framework. The first time you use a language, the system asks to download it.
- **Watch to iPhone, directly:** Apple Watch recordings travel straight to your paired iPhone. No intermediate server is involved.
- **Optional Private Cloud Compute, off by default:** On iOS and macOS 27 or later, where available, an optional setting lets long meetings use Apple's Private Cloud Compute. Only text is sent, never audio or photos, Apple doesn't store it, and each meeting shows where it was processed.

## How the pieces combine

From the moment you tap record to the finished minutes:

1. **Capture:** AVAudioEngine records the microphone; on Mac, Core Audio taps add the call audio; on Apple Watch, WatchConnectivity delivers the recording to the iPhone.
2. **Transcribe:** SpeechAnalyzer produces the transcript on device, and speaker separation labels who spoke when.
3. **Understand:** Foundation Models turn the transcript, your markers, meeting context and the text from photos and documents into minutes, tasks, decisions and insights.
4. **Act:** EventKit, App Intents, Translation and the share sheet move the results into Calendar, Reminders, Siri, other languages, PDF and email.

## For developers: the frameworks and how they fit

Quiet Scribe is a Swift app for iOS, iPadOS, macOS and watchOS with zero external dependencies. These are the Apple technologies it combines.

- **Speech (SpeechAnalyzer and SpeechTranscriber):** On-device transcription. Language models are downloaded through the system's asset inventory, and the spoken language can be detected between English and Spanish before transcribing.
- **Foundation Models:** Apple's on-device language model writes the summary, minutes, tasks, decisions and insights with guided generation. Long meetings are split into chunks and combined, and Ask answers questions grounded in the transcript.
- **Private Cloud Compute:** An opt-in route for long meetings on iOS and macOS 27+, off by default, limited to text and used only where available. If it isn't available, processing falls back to the device. On Apple Watch with watchOS 27+, Ask can use it when the iPhone isn't nearby, with a notice before and after.
- **Speaker separation with Accelerate:** Speakers are separated on device by extracting acoustic features from the audio and clustering them with Accelerate. On Mac, the microphone and system audio tracks also tell your voice apart from the call.
- **Translation:** Apple's Translation framework translates every deliverable and the transcript in memory, on device; translations are not saved or synced.
- **Vision:** Text in photos of whiteboards, slides and documents is recognized on device and used as reference for the minutes.
- **App Intents, Siri and Shortcuts:** On iPhone, App Shortcuts expose recording, markers, Ask, opening a meeting and sharing tasks to Siri and Shortcuts. On Apple Watch, intents start, stop and mark a recording, including from the Action button on Apple Watch Ultra.
- **ActivityKit and WidgetKit:** A Live Activity shows the recording on the Lock Screen and in the Dynamic Island; widgets and watch complications show the next meeting and a Record button.
- **Core Audio process taps:** On Mac, system audio is captured with Core Audio process taps and the microphone with AVAudioEngine, in separate tracks, with no screen recording and no virtual drivers.
- **WatchConnectivity:** Recordings made on Apple Watch are transferred as files to the paired iPhone, which sends a compact summary of recent meetings back to the watch.
- **SwiftData and CloudKit:** Meetings are stored with SwiftData and synced through the user's private CloudKit database. Audio files are excluded from sync.
- **EventKit:** Reads upcoming events to link recordings to meetings, and writes events and reminders only when the user asks.
- **Liquid Glass:** The iPhone and iPad interface uses Liquid Glass for the recording controls, live markers and meeting views.
- **Icon Composer:** The app icon is a layered Icon Composer file with glass effects and default, dark and tinted variants.
- **Evaluations:** An internal test suite built with Xcode's Evaluations framework runs the real minutes and Ask pipelines with the on-device model and scores them against thresholds. It's a quality tool; users never see it.

## What we don't claim

Automatic transcripts and AI minutes can contain mistakes, especially with crosstalk, noise or uncommon names. Review important minutes before you share them. We don't publish accuracy percentages or benchmarks we haven't measured.