The Simplest Collaboration Model

Most team transcription tools require a server. Someone has to manage accounts. Someone has to pay for seats. Someone has to configure permissions. Someone has to worry about who can see what.

My Transcriber takes a different approach. It writes transcriptions to a folder on your Mac. That's it.

If that folder happens to be a shared folder -- Dropbox, SharePoint, Google Drive, iCloud Drive, or any other sync service -- then everyone who has access to that folder can see the transcriptions.

No server. No accounts to manage. No permissions to configure. It's just a folder.

How It Works

Each person on your team runs My Transcriber on their own Mac with their own Apple account. When they record a voice memo, it gets transcribed locally on their machine.

The transcription -- a plain Markdown file with metadata -- gets written to the output folder. Each person gets their own account subfolder automatically. The structure looks like this:

Shared Folder/
├── Registry/
│   ├── 7a571023/voice/    ← Alice's transcriptions
│   ├── b2e89f14/voice/    ← Bob's transcriptions
│   └── c4d01a8e/voice/    ← Carol's transcriptions
└── Notes/
    └── life/              ← Combined rollups

The account subfolder names are derived from each person's Apple account ID. They're deterministic -- the same person always gets the same folder -- but they don't contain any personal information.

Setup in Three Steps

Step 1: Create a shared folder using whatever file sync service your team already uses. Dropbox, Google Drive, SharePoint, iCloud Drive -- any of them work.

Step 2: Each team member installs My Transcriber on their Mac and points it to the shared folder as their output location.

Step 3: Done.

That's the entire setup. Each person records voice memos on their iPhone, Apple Watch, or Mac. The transcriptions appear in the shared folder. Everyone can see them.

No Server, No Accounts

This is worth emphasizing because it's unusual.

There is no My Transcriber server. There are no My Transcriber accounts. There is no admin panel. There is no user management. There is no permissions system.

The permissions are whatever your file sync service provides. If someone can write to the shared folder, their transcriptions appear there. If someone can read the shared folder, they can see everyone's transcriptions.

This means you don't need IT approval to set it up. You don't need to evaluate a vendor. You don't need to sign a data processing agreement with us. Your data never touches our servers because we don't have servers.

Searchable Across the Whole Team

Because everything is plain Markdown files in a folder, searching is trivial.

On Mac, Spotlight indexes the shared folder. You can search for any word spoken in any team member's voice memo. If you use a tool like VS Code, Obsidian, or even just grep, you can search across all transcriptions instantly.

Each transcription file includes YAML frontmatter with the date, duration, and language. So you can filter by date range, find all transcriptions from a specific week, or search within a specific team member's folder.

No proprietary search index. No "search within the app" limitation. It's just files.

Use Case: Consulting Teams

Here's a scenario I keep hearing about from early users.

A consulting team visits different clients throughout the week. After each visit, each consultant records a quick voice memo -- a debrief of what happened, what was discussed, what needs follow-up.

They record on their Apple Watch while walking back to the car. Or on their iPhone during the commute home. Five minutes of talking, tops.

By the time they're home, the transcription is in the shared folder. The team lead can read through everyone's debriefs the next morning. No meeting required.

End of the week, all the debriefs from every client visit are searchable in one place. Need to find what was discussed with Client X three weeks ago? Search the folder.

Use Case: Field Workers

Field inspectors, maintenance crews, site supervisors -- people who work with their hands and can't stop to type.

Voice memo on the watch: "Unit 7B, east wall, noticed water damage around the window frame. Looks like it's been there a while. Recommend full inspection before winter."

That's now a searchable, dated record in the shared folder. The office team can see it without anyone having to remember to file a report.

Compare that to the traditional approach: worker takes a mental note, maybe jots something on paper, gets back to the office, types up a report if they remember, files it somewhere nobody looks.

Use Case: Distributed Teams

Remote teams across time zones. Everyone's working asynchronously.

Instead of scheduling another meeting to share updates, each person records a quick voice memo at the end of their day. "Here's what I worked on, here's where I'm stuck, here's what I need from the team."

The transcriptions land in the shared folder. When the next time zone wakes up, the updates are there -- as searchable text, not as a 30-minute recording nobody wants to listen to.

This is faster than writing Slack messages, more structured than voice messages, and it doesn't interrupt anyone.

Not Locked to Any Sync Service

Because My Transcriber just writes files to a folder, it works with whatever sync service you're already using.

Dropbox: Create a shared Dropbox folder. Point everyone's My Transcriber output there.

Google Drive: Same thing. Create a shared Drive folder, use Google Drive for Desktop to sync it locally.

SharePoint / OneDrive: Works the same way. IT teams love this because it stays within their existing infrastructure.

iCloud Drive: If everyone's on Apple, a shared iCloud Drive folder works too.

Syncthing, Resilio, NAS: If you run your own sync infrastructure, that works too. It's just a folder.

Switching sync services later? Just move the folder. Nothing else changes.

Privacy Considerations

Each person's voice memo is transcribed on their own Mac. The audio never leaves their machine. Only the text transcription ends up in the shared folder.

If you use the accept-and-delete workflow, the source audio is deleted after transcription. The shared folder only ever contains Markdown text files -- no audio recordings.

This matters for teams in regulated industries. The transcription is just text in a file. There's no audio recording being stored on a third-party server. There's no third-party server at all.

What About Conflicts?

Because each person writes to their own account subfolder, there are no file conflicts. Alice's files don't interfere with Bob's files. They're in completely separate directories.

The sync service just needs to handle one-way writes per subfolder -- which is the easiest case for any sync engine. No merge conflicts. No "someone edited the same file" problems.

The only shared files are in the Notes folder, if you use rollups. But those are generated automatically and can be regenerated if needed.

Scaling Up

This approach scales naturally. Two people sharing a folder? Same setup. Twenty people? Same setup. The folder just gets more subfolders.

Adding a new team member: install My Transcriber, point to the shared folder, done. They get their own subfolder automatically.

Removing a team member: stop sharing the folder with them. Their existing transcriptions stay (unless you delete their subfolder). No account to deactivate, no license to reassign.

Comparing to Traditional Tools

Traditional team transcription services like Otter, Fireflies, or Sonix:

• Require accounts for each team member
• Charge per seat or per minute
• Send audio to cloud servers for processing
• Lock your data in their platform
• Need admin configuration and permissions
• Require everyone to use the same tool

My Transcriber with a shared folder:

• No accounts needed
• Free
• All processing happens locally on each Mac
• Data is plain Markdown in a folder you control
• No configuration beyond pointing to a folder
• Uses the Apple Voice Memos app everyone already has

Tips for Teams

Name your memos. Apple Voice Memos lets you name recordings. That name appears in the transcription. If everyone names their memos descriptively -- "Client X debrief Jan 15" -- the folder becomes much easier to browse.

Use consistent naming. Agree on a format for memo names. Date first, then context. This makes sorting and searching predictable.

Check the frontmatter. Each transcription file has metadata: date, duration, language. You can use this for automated processing -- like a script that generates weekly summaries per team member.

Consider Obsidian. If you open the shared folder as an Obsidian vault, you get full-text search, tags, links, and all of Obsidian's features across the whole team's transcriptions.

Try It With Your Team

Set up takes five minutes. Create a shared folder, have each team member point My Transcriber to it, and start recording voice memos. The transcriptions will be there when you need them.

No server to maintain. No vendor to evaluate. No seats to purchase. Just a folder and Markdown files.

Each team member needs a Mac running macOS 15+. The shared folder can be on any file sync service.