Mermer
iPhone
A voice recorder that writes down what was said.
Recordings are hard to use. You end up with a list of grey rectangles labelled by date, and the only way to find one sentence is to listen to all of them again.
Mermer transcribes every recording on your iPhone, works out who was speaking, and makes the words searchable. No account, no server, no subscription — and your audio never leaves the phone.
Rich 0:04
So we said we'd decide about the garden fence before the weekend.
Anna 0:11
Right, and the quote was eight hundred, which felt steep for six panels.
Rich 0:19
Let's get one more quote. If it's close, we go with the first one.
Record, then read it back
There is nothing to set up and nothing to sign into. Tap the button and talk.
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Tap record
Recording keeps going when the screen locks, so you can put the phone down mid-conversation without losing the rest of it.
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The transcript appears
When you stop, Mermer transcribes the audio using Apple's on-device speech model — a few seconds for a couple of minutes of talk — and lays it out as paragraphs you can actually read.
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Search it, share it
Find any recording by a phrase from inside it. Share the audio file, or the transcript as text, anywhere iOS can share.
It knows who was talking
A two-person conversation is unreadable as one wall of text. Mermer separates the voices and labels each turn.
Speakers, separated
Mermer works out how many people are talking and splits the transcript into turns — down to the word, so a quick back-and-forth doesn't get stitched onto the wrong person.
Name them once
Tap "Speaker 1" and type a name. It applies across the whole transcript, and to anything you share.
Remembered voices
Choose to remember a voice and Mermer recognises it in later recordings, labelling those turns by name automatically. Voices you remember are listed on one screen and can be deleted whenever you like.
Search what was said
Type a phrase and Mermer shows the recordings containing it, with the matching line quoted so you know why it matched.
Timestamps when you want them
Turn timestamps on to see when each turn happened, or leave them off and read it like a page of dialogue.
Undo a deletion
Delete a recording and an Undo button stays on screen. Change your mind and the recording and its transcript come straight back.
Nothing leaves your phone
This is the part most transcription apps cannot offer, because their transcription happens on someone else's computer.
No uploads, ever
Mermer contains no networking code of its own. Your recordings are never sent anywhere, because there is nowhere for them to go.
No account, no server
Nothing to sign up for, nothing to log into, and no database somewhere with your conversations in it.
No analytics
No tracking, no telemetry, no crash reporting, no third-party SDKs. The App Store privacy label reads "Data Not Collected", and that is the whole story.
Voices stay yours
A remembered voice is stored on your device as a set of numbers, not a recording, and cannot be turned back into audio. Delete it and it is gone.
Free, with nothing to buy
No subscription, no in-app purchases, no ads, no per-minute transcription limit. There is no payment code in the app at all.
Open source
Mermer is released under the GPL, so the claims on this page can be checked against the code rather than taken on trust.
The one download. Apple's speech model is part of iOS, not part of Mermer, and iOS fetches it the first time you ask for a transcript. That download comes from Apple to your phone — no audio is uploaded, then or ever. Mermer shows the progress plainly instead of pretending nothing is happening.
Coming to the App Store
Mermer is in review. In the meantime, the support page explains how it works, and the privacy policy sets out exactly what happens to your recordings — which is that they stay on your phone.