Documentation

Everything you need to install Zerds, record your first meeting, and keep it all on your machine.

Zerds is a private, fully-local meeting-transcription app. It records your microphone and the other side of a call — anything that makes sound, so Teams, Zoom, a browser tab or a phone on speaker all work with no integration to wait for — transcribes it on your device, and can summarize and search it, all without a cloud, a sign-up, or any telemetry. On Discord it goes further: your own bot receives one track per participant, with their real names.

What Zerds does

• Dual-channel capture — your mic and the other side on separate tracks, merged into one timeline. It is system loopback, so it works with any app that makes sound, including ones that do not exist yet.
• Local transcription with Whisper (or optional NVIDIA Parakeet for 25 languages).
• Optional on-device AI — summaries, a living project overview, and chat grounded in your transcripts.
• Discord goes further — your own bot joins the channel visibly and receives one track per participant, with their real Discord names, by construction rather than by guesswork.
• Searchable history, per-line audio replay, and export to Markdown, SRT, or JSON.
• Privacy by architecture — optional at-rest encryption, scheduled auto-delete, and no data ever leaving your machine.

Where to start

• Install & setup — get the installer with your licence key, and grant the microphone permission.
• Your first recording — from launch to a saved transcript.
• Privacy & your data — exactly what stays local and where it's stored.