meeting-transcriber-mcp

A Model Context Protocol stdio server for Meeting Transcriber, the local-first meeting transcriber for macOS. It lets an agent submit an audio file, read the diarized transcript, name the speakers, and turn meeting detection on or off — without any of the audio leaving the Mac.

This is a thin client over the app's own Local Automation API, a localhost-only HTTP surface the app ships for exactly this purpose. No audio, models or transcripts pass through any cloud service: the transcription runs on the Apple Neural Engine and this server only moves file paths and text over the loopback interface.

Requirements

• macOS 14.2+ with Meeting Transcriber installed from Homebrew or built from source. The automation API is compiled out of the App Store variant, because that sandbox forbids the network.server entitlement the listener needs.

• Node.js 20 or newer.

• The automation API turned on. It is off by default:

  • Settings → Advanced → "Local Automation API" for a persistent toggle, or

  • launch the app with MEETINGTRANSCRIBER_DEBUG_RPC=1 for one session.

The app writes a bearer token to ~/Library/Application Support/MeetingTranscriber/.rpc-token (mode 0600) on first launch of the API. This server reads it from there, so there is nothing to configure by hand. The token rotates whenever the API is toggled off and on; the server re-reads the file and retries once when the app rejects a stale copy.

Related MCP server: ParrotScribe MCP Server

Setup

Cursor

Add to ~/.cursor/mcp.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "meeting-transcriber": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "meeting-transcriber-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Claude Code

claude mcp add meeting-transcriber -- npx -y meeting-transcriber-mcp

From source

git clone https://github.com/msvargas/meeting-transcriber-mcp.git
cd meeting-transcriber-mcp
npm install && npm run build

Then point the command at node with args of ["/absolute/path/to/dist/index.js"].

Tools

Two deliberate omissions

No microphone recording control. The app's API can start and stop a microphone-only recording for an in-person meeting, and this server does not expose it. Nobody in the room can see an agent decide to record them, and the app's own docs note that a start can raise a permission dialog "unannounced". Drive that from the menu bar or a Stream Deck key instead.

No toggle on set_watch. A toggle applies a delta to a state the caller cannot see reliably, so if the meeting ended or somebody used the menu bar in between, it does the opposite of what was intended and stays inverted. start and stop express the desired end state and converge no matter what happened before.

Configuration

Every variable is optional.

Reading the results

Two fields are easy to misread, so the server spells them out in prose.

An absent echo verdict is not a clean one. On a loudspeaker recording the far end lands on the microphone track too, and the app measures that before transcribing. When the verdict is missing, nothing was measured — the job was single-source, a track was silent, or the tracks overlapped for less than one analysis window. Only an explicit "not detected" means analysed and clean, and this server never collapses the two.

A job in error is not always final. A user can retry it from the menu bar, which moves the same id back to waiting. A poller that sees error and keeps polling may well watch the job run again and end in done.

Inherited limitations

These come from the app's API, not from this server:

• Polling only. There is no webhook or push channel, so a client polls get_job. On loopback a 3–5 second interval costs effectively nothing.

• No upload. A path must already be readable on the Mac running the app. Submitting a file that only exists on another machine fails.

• The speaker database is read-only on this path. Already-enrolled voices are recognized, but no endpoint here enrolls new ones.

• Starting to watch can raise a macOS permission prompt. Grant microphone and screen recording once interactively before relying on set_watch.

Development

npm run typecheck
npm test          # 26 tests, no running app required: fetch is injected
npm run check     # typecheck + tests + repository hygiene
npm run build
bash scripts/smoke.sh   # drives the built server over stdio against a real app

The tests connect a real MCP client to the server over an in-memory transport and stub the HTTP layer, so they cover the tool schemas, the status-code mapping and the rendering without touching Meeting Transcriber.

License

MIT