Questions and answers
Does a bot join my calls?
No. Sextant records on your Mac, from your microphone, the sound of the call app and its window. Nothing joins the meeting and the call app is not changed.
Do the other people know they are being recorded?
Not unless you tell them: Sextant does not announce anything in the call by itself. Tell the call copies a short message for you to paste in the call chat, and marks the call as announced; you can also mark it by hand if you said it out loud. Rules about recording calls differ between countries and states. Sextant is not legal advice; check what applies to you.
Does it record automatically?
Only if you choose that. When a call starts Sextant asks whether to record it, and nothing is captured until you click Record. For each app you can set Ask, Always or Never. A call set to Always shows a notice and a red menu bar icon while it records.
Which call apps does it work with?
Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Discord, FaceTime, WhatsApp, Telegram and Webex, and calls in Chrome, Safari, Arc, Brave, Edge and Firefox (for example Google Meet). Any other app that uses the microphone can be recorded too. You can also import audio and video files, and record a meeting in a room with the microphone only.
Is anything uploaded?
Not by default. Recordings, transcripts, summaries and the search index are made and kept on your Mac. Sextant connects to the internet to download its models when you ask it to. If you turn on third-party transcription and give it your own ElevenLabs API key, the audio of your calls is sent to ElevenLabs to be transcribed; nothing else is. The details are on the privacy and security page.
Do I need an account?
The app has no account and no sign-in. How a licence is delivered will be described on the pricing page when Sextant goes on sale.
Which languages does it understand?
English, for now. Calls in other languages are not transcribed correctly.
Which Macs does it run on?
Macs with Apple silicon (M1 or later) running macOS 15 or later. Intel Macs are not supported: the speech models are built to run on the Neural Engine of Apple silicon.
Will it slow down my Mac during a call?
It is built to stay out of the way: speech recognition runs on the Neural Engine, video is encoded by the hardware encoder, and the heavier work runs after the call at low priority. Measured on one Mac (a MacBook Pro with M5 Max, 1 October 2026), the recording engine used about 16% of one CPU core during a call. Other Macs have not been measured yet. You can also tell Sextant to process calls only when the Mac is plugged in.
What happens if the app or the Mac crashes during a call?
The recording is written to disk in small pieces as it happens, so a crash loses at most the last few seconds. On the next launch Sextant recovers the call and processes it. After every call it also checks the files and tells you plainly if anything is missing, for example if the call audio stopped.
Can I get my notes out?
Yes. Every call exports to Markdown, JSON or SRT subtitles. Automatic export writes a Markdown note for every finished call into a folder you choose, such as the folder of your notes app, and does not overwrite a note you have edited there.
How much disk space do recordings use?
Video takes most of the space. The Storage page shows how much each call uses, and cleanup rules can remove video or audio after a number of days while keeping transcripts, summaries, notes and highlight pictures.
When can I get it, and what does it cost?
Is there a version for Windows, Linux, iPhone or Android?
No. Sextant is a Mac app.