Live and real-time transcription
Daisy transcribes while you record, on-device, and the text it produces during the meeting is your transcript. When you stop, Daisy keeps it. Nothing is sent anywhere at any point.
Whether you see that text while the meeting runs is a separate display choice.
This article covers the Daisy desktop app. On iPhone and iPad, live transcription uses Apple's on-device speech engine.
What you see while recording
The live transcript separates speech by source: your system audio is labeled Them, and your own microphone lines appear alongside it unlabeled. Each settled line carries a timestamp so you can find that moment again later. Words appear as they're spoken and settle into clean text a moment later; interim words look slightly faded and italic until they settle.
With a Whisper model, Daisy primes the transcriber with the meeting's own vocabulary: the attendee names from a calendar event and the term lists on any tags you attached. Those words are recognised more reliably.
Before any speech arrives you'll see waiting for live transcript….
Captions also appear in the floating mini-window, which shows a tail of the last few far-side lines as bubbles. Your own voice is left out there. Until the other side speaks it reads Waiting for others to speak….
"Possible missed speech" markers
Occasionally you'll see a line like:
[possible missed speech — meeting audio was faint for 4s]
That means Daisy heard what sounded like speech on that track but could not make out any words, usually because the audio was very faint or clipped. The audio is still saved, and the marker shows that something was said there.
You can turn these off under Settings → Providers → Advanced → Transcription tuning → Faint-audio markers. They aren't available on macOS.
Showing or hiding captions
Settings → Recordings → Live captions → Show captions while recording is a single on/off switch, saved per machine. The group hint reads: Text as you talk. Display only — the transcript is always produced.
Turn it off and the recording view shows a card titled Live captions are hidden, noting that the transcript is still being written. Transcription runs either way; the switch only changes whether you watch it happen.
When there's no model installed
If no transcription model is installed on this machine, Daisy tells you twice:
- A banner across the top: No transcription model installed. Recordings are audio-only until one is installed in Settings → Providers, with an Open Settings button.
- In the recording view, a card titled Live transcription is unavailable — No speech model was found on this machine — audio is still being recorded and can be transcribed once a model is installed.
Your audio is still captured, and Daisy can transcribe it once a model is in place. See Transcription language for the model list.
If an engine stumbles mid-meeting
If the transcriber fails during a meeting, Daisy restarts it or switches to another installed engine. If your machine can't keep up with live speech, Daisy pauses live transcription for that session, keeps recording, and completes the transcript when the recording ends. Your audio is kept in every case. The Recording status toast shows the engine in use (Transcribing live: …).
You may see the same line twice — that's normal
During a call, the other person's words can appear twice — once on your own microphone line and once on the labeled Them line.
Daisy captures two independent audio streams:
- Your microphone — your voice. In the live view these lines carry no label.
- Them — the system audio coming out of your speakers (the other side of the call), labeled Them.
When you use speakers, your microphone picks up the other person's voice, so their words get transcribed on both sides. Daisy detects these mic-bleed duplicates by comparing the wording and drops one copy. In the live view it always drops the microphone copy and keeps the Them line. At finalize it compares the two recordings acoustically to work out which copy is the echo, and keeps the true source.
Using headphones eliminates this at the source: the other side's audio never leaks back into your mic.
What changes when you stop
When you press ✦ Finish & summarize, Daisy keeps the live transcript, fills in any stretch the live pass didn't cover, runs echo cancellation, removes the mic-bleed duplicates, sorts out who said what on-device, and writes the summary. See the FAQ for rough timings.