Kanary is a macOS-only menu bar utility built by indie developer Kenn Ejima. It brings meeting recording, transcription, and summarization together with keyboard-extension features in a single app, and every bit of processing stays on your Mac. After an initial release in April 2026 centered on the keyboard extensions, v2 arrived with the Voice feature set for recording, transcribing, and summarizing meetings, and updates have continued through v2.1, which adds control via CLI and Agent Skills.
Key Features
- Meeting recording, transcription, and summarization: Records your microphone and speaker output simultaneously on separate channels, then generates timestamped transcripts with Apple’s SpeechAnalyzer. It also produces structured summaries automatically, covering overview, decisions, and action items
- Live captions and translation: Displays speech as subtitles in real time, and in Bilingual mode shows offline translation alongside it
- On-device processing: Recording, transcription, and translation all happen on your Mac — no audio data is sent to external servers, and no bot joins your meetings
- Keyboard extensions: Tap, hold, and gesture on modifier keys to move, resize, and snap windows, launch and hide apps, and switch between Japanese and alphanumeric input
- Enter Guard: Prevents accidental sends while your IME is mid-conversion. You can remap Cmd+Enter as the send key across major AI chat apps including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Grok, and Microsoft Copilot
- Browser extensions: Ships a Calendar Launcher that auto-joins major meetings such as Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams straight from your Google Calendar events, plus a Chrome extension version of Enter Guard for web chat and social apps
- CLI and Agent Skill integration: The
kanarycommand added in v2.1 lets coding agents like Claude Code and Codex access transcription and summarization of your recordings directly (Pro plan and above)
Pricing
| Plan | Monthly price | Highlights |
|---|---|---|
| Free | Free | Unlimited recording and live captions. Transcription and summarization capped at 75 minutes per recording, translation at 75 minutes per week, and AI summaries at 2 per month |
| Personal | $2/month (billed annually) | Unlimited in-app transcription, summarization, and translation. AI summaries up to 8 per month. iCloud Drive sync and simultaneous sign-in on up to 5 Macs |
| Pro | $8/month (billed annually) | Everything in Personal, plus unlimited access via CLI and unlimited AI summaries |
| Team | $8/seat/month (billed annually, 2 seats minimum) | Full Pro features for every seat. Per-seat billing and invitations |
Pricing reflects information as of August 2026. The official site does not list annual totals, presenting prices as a monthly rate billed annually instead. Check the official site for current pricing.
Pros and Cons
✅ Pros
- Recording, transcription, translation, and summarization all complete on-device, so audio data never leaves your machine
- No bot needs to join your meeting app, so you can record without appearing in the participant list
- Recording microphone and speaker on separate channels gives high speaker-separation accuracy
- The free plan is permanent, and the keyboard extensions (window management, input switching, Enter Guard) are built into the same app
⚠️ Cons
- macOS only — no Windows or Intel Mac support (voice features require macOS 26 Tahoe or later)
- No features for sharing or searching recordings across a team; the design assumes individual use
- No external integrations such as Salesforce, HubSpot, or Zapier, and no admin-facing usage analytics
- In jurisdictions requiring all-party consent, you need to notify participants before recording (the official site notes that recording laws vary by region)
How It Compares
| Criterion | Kanary | Otter.ai |
|---|---|---|
| Processing | On-device (no audio sent externally) | Cloud processing |
| Bot participation | Not required (records without notifying participants) | A bot joins the meeting |
| Team sharing and search | Individual use assumed; no sharing features | Shared workspace searchable across the team |
| External integrations | None | Integrates with Salesforce, HubSpot, and others |
The official site also names Granola in its copy as another bot-free Mac tool for AI notes, though it offers no detailed feature comparison. Dictation tools like Wispr Flow and superwhisper turn your own speech into text, which makes what they capture fundamentally different from Kanary’s whole-meeting recording.
Who It’s For
- Anyone who needs to record confidential sales calls, HR interviews, or legal discussions that cannot leave the organization, without leaving audio in the cloud
- Developers and bilingual users who switch apps and toggle between Japanese and alphanumeric input dozens of times a day
- Anyone who wants to follow meetings with real-time translated captions, even offline or while traveling abroad
- Power users who want to process and summarize recorded meeting data automatically from the CLI via Claude Code or other coding agents (Pro plan)
Conclusion
Kanary stands apart on two fronts: it keeps meeting recording, transcription, and summarization entirely on-device, and it folds keyboard extensions into the same app. That makes it an especially good fit for confidential discussions you’d rather keep out of the cloud, and for users who switch between Japanese and alphanumeric input constantly. On the other hand, since it’s macOS-only and has no team sharing, a cloud service like Otter.ai is the better choice when you need to share notes across multiple people or connect to external systems.