Minutes
by Minutes · Local-first conversation memory in plain Markdown
BenchRank score
Screenshots of Minutes
Homepage
Overview
Minutes records meetings, voice memos and dictation, transcribes them on your machine with whisper.cpp and pyannote diarisation, and writes each one as a Markdown file with YAML frontmatter in a local folder. Summarisation is optional and runs through your own LLM. A CLI, a Tauri desktop app and 34 MCP tools let Claude, Codex, Gemini CLI and other MCP clients read that folder.
- Best for
- Mac users who want meeting and voice-memo transcripts kept locally as Markdown their AI agents can search
- Pricing
- No prices are shown; the pages state Minutes is MIT licensed and free forever.
- Runs on
- macOSWindowsCLI
Strengths and trade-offs
Strengths
- Audio and transcripts stay on your machine; nothing is uploaded
- Output is plain Markdown with YAML frontmatter; grep and git work
- 34 MCP tools for Claude, Codex, Gemini CLI and other MCP clients
- MIT licensed and free, with a public eval harness
Trade-offs
- Desktop is Mac or Windows; the iPhone voice memo pipeline needs a Mac
- Parakeet and Apple Speech settings fall back to Whisper until gates pass
- Pre-1.0 (v0.24.0); retention rules and agent enforcement listed as not shipped
- Summaries need your own LLM (Claude or Ollama); none is bundled
How Minutes markets itself
A structured read of the promise, proof and page design on Minutes’s captured homepage.
Homepage capture
“Your AI remembers every conversation — and no one can take it from you.”
- Angle: Open source / ownership
- Hero: Product screenshot
Pricing
Published plans and prices from Minutes’s own pricing page.
How this score is made up
Each dimension is scored out of 100 and combined into the headline score using fixed weights.
Documentation
Publicly reachable docs — coverage, freshness, code samples and machine readability.
Agent friendliness
How readable the site is to an automated client: llms.txt, structured data, server-rendered content, crawler access.
Pricing transparency
Whether real prices are published, self-serve signup exists, and usage costs are knowable without a sales call.
Changelog
A public, dated record of what shipped and when — the clearest signal that a product is still alive.
Marketing site structure
Whether the site answers a buyer's questions: clear positioning, the pages that matter, and accessibility.
Page speed
How fast the site loads for real visitors: Chrome UX Report 75th-percentile LCP, INP and CLS, with a Lighthouse mobile run standing in where a site has too little traffic for field data.
Operational trust
Status page and incident history, security disclosure, compliance and data-processing documentation.
Measured, but not part of the score
Useful to know, but not a mark for or against the product — so these do not affect the ranking.
MCP supportnot counted in this category
Whether an agent can drive the product through the Model Context Protocol, and how much setup that takes.
API qualitynot counted in this category
Public API surface: machine-readable spec, official SDKs, documented auth, errors, rate limits and versioning.
Openness
Source availability, self-hosting, data export and open standards. Scored and shown, but not part of the composite — paid SaaS is not worse for being paid SaaS.
Maintenance
Release cadence and repository activity. Scored and shown, but not part of the composite — it is only measurable for open repositories.
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Where this comes from
The Minutes pages BenchRank reads when it scores the product — its documentation, release notes, status and security pages, and its repository where there is one.
Alternatives in Dictation & Transcription
Ranked 1
71.7 — BenchRank score out of 100Meetily
Meetily · Local-first meeting transcription and summaries for Windows and macOS
Best for: Windows and macOS users who need meeting transcripts to stay on their own device for confidentiality.
Ranked 2
60.9 — BenchRank score out of 100Tota
Tota · On-device Mac dictation and transcription built on Whisper
Best for: Mac users who want dictation and transcription that runs offline on their own device.
Ranked 4
47.2 — BenchRank score out of 100Vibe
Vibe Transcribe · Local-first audio and video transcription
Best for: People transcribing audio or video on their own machine rather than uploading it to a service.
Is this your product?
Claim Minutes to manage its profile. Claiming lets you suggest edits to the descriptive fields — it never changes scores or rankings.