I Built Sondine Because I Keep Forgetting the Best Parts of My Conversations
There's a moment that happens to me several times a week. I'm on a Discord call with my team — a daily standup, a quick sync, a casual conversation that suddenly turns into a real decision — and a few hours later, the details are already slipping away. Not the big picture. The small things. The exact number a colleague threw out. The name of the tool someone recommended. The specific way a teammate described a problem that made everything click.
The best parts of a conversation are rarely what you said. They're what someone else said — the small details, the offhand remarks, the precise phrasing that you'd never reconstruct from memory alone.
I didn't catch them. Not because I wasn't paying attention — because I was fully present in the conversation instead of typing notes.
That gap between living a conversation and remembering it bothered me for a long time. So I built something to close it.
What Sondine is
Sondine is a macOS app that sits quietly in your menu bar and captures every conversation happening on your Mac. Your microphone, your system audio, your video calls, your voice messages — all of it. It transcribes everything in real time, locally, on your device. No audio ever leaves your machine.
When a conversation ends, Sondine organizes it for you. It generates a title, a summary, and a list of action items — automatically. Later, when you need to find something, you search for it. Any word, any phrase, across weeks of conversations. It's like Cmd+F for your memory.
Sondine is still early — think of it as a working beta that I use every day on my own machine. It's rough around the edges, but the core works: it records, it transcribes, it organizes, it searches. The foundation is there.
The power of not having to think about it
Most recording tools ask you to make a decision before a conversation starts: is this worth recording? Should I hit the button? Is this meeting important enough?
Sondine doesn't ask. It runs in the background, always. It captures everything — the important calls and the ones you thought wouldn't matter until they did. The five-minute chat where someone dropped a crucial detail. The offhand comment that turned out to be the best idea of the week.
You don't have to decide what's worth remembering. You just talk, and Sondine remembers. Some of it will be noise. But somewhere in that noise is every detail, every name, every number, every promise that would have otherwise disappeared.
This isn't really about meetings
Here's what most transcription tools get wrong: they think the problem is meetings. It's not. The problem is that we lose most of what we hear, all day, every day.
I watch a YouTube video explaining a concept I've been trying to understand for weeks. Twenty minutes later, I remember the gist but not the key insight. I listen to a podcast on my commute and hear something that could change how I approach a project. By the time I'm at my desk, it's gone. I have a phone call with a client who gives me critical feedback, and I scramble to jot it down after hanging up.
Meetings are just the beginning. The real opportunity is capturing everything — and making it searchable, private, and useful.
That's the vision behind Sondine. Not a meeting tool. An audio memory.
Why local matters
Every major transcription service works the same way: your voice goes to the cloud, gets processed on someone else's servers, and comes back as text. The companies behind these services can access your data, train their models on it, or lose it in a breach. You have no control.
I didn't want that. Not for myself, and not for anyone using Sondine.
Sondine processes everything on your Mac. There's no server. No OpenAI API call. No Google Cloud. No account to create. Your transcripts are stored in a local database that only you can access. If you uninstall the app, the data goes with it — because it was never anywhere else.
This isn't a marketing angle. It's a fundamental design decision. Your voice is one of the most personal things about you. It should stay yours.
Where Sondine is going
What I've described is the foundation. It works, and I rely on it daily. But the vision is much bigger.
Your iPhone is the only device you need. There's a growing market of dedicated recording gadgets — AI pins, pendants, standalone recorders — that cost hundreds of dollars to do one thing: capture your voice. But you already carry a device that's more powerful than all of them: your phone. I'm building an iPhone companion app that turns it into a silent, always-ready recorder. Walk into a meeting and Sondine starts capturing — with speaker diarization, without you ever pulling the phone out of your pocket. When you get home, everything syncs back to your Mac. No extra hardware. No subscriptions. Just the phone you already have, doing something it should have done all along.
Your voice as a data layer
This is the part I'm most excited about, and I think it's what makes Sondine fundamentally different from every other transcription tool out there.
At its core, Sondine does one thing exceptionally well: it turns everything you hear into searchable, structured text. That data is yours, stored locally, in a format that's easy to access and work with. Sondine is the engine that creates this data. What happens next is wide open.
I'll build smart features on top — summaries across conversations, flashcards from educational content, insights about your communication patterns. But here's what I find even more interesting: because the data lives on your machine in a clean, accessible format, someone else could build an entirely different app that reads the same transcripts and does something I never imagined. A tool that cross-references your conversations with your calendar. An analytics dashboard that tracks which topics eat up most of your week. A coaching app that helps you communicate more clearly based on patterns in your actual speech.
I don't know what the best use of this data will be — and that's the point. The same way a camera roll becomes useful in ways you didn't anticipate when you took the photos, an archive of everything you've heard and said opens doors nobody has walked through yet.
Sondine creates the raw material. The possibilities branch out from there.
Smarter over time. The more you use Sondine, the richer your archive becomes. Imagine an app that notices you've been discussing a project all week and offers to summarize everything about it. Or one that detects you watched an educational video and generates flashcards so you actually retain what you learned. Or one that analyzes your speaking patterns and helps you communicate more clearly.
Your data, your way. For teams and companies that want full control, I'm building a "bring your own database" option. Same features, your infrastructure. No compromises.
I don't know which of these ideas will ship first. But the architecture is designed to grow, and the foundation is solid.
Start early, remember more
There's one thing I believe deeply about this kind of tool: the sooner you start, the more valuable it becomes.
The value of an audio memory compounds over time. Six months from now, you'll be able to search back through hundreds of conversations and find exactly the detail you need. A year from now, you'll have a genuine record of your professional life — every decision, every idea, every commitment, every small detail that would have otherwise vanished.
You can't go back and record conversations you've already had. But you can make sure you never lose another one.
Join the waitlist
Sondine is coming to macOS. It's lightweight, private, and designed to run in the background without getting in your way. No account required. No cloud. Just your voice, your Mac, and a memory that never forgets.
If this resonates with you, join the waitlist. You'll get early access — and you'll be among the first to build your audio memory.