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Introduction
Stenny records your lectures on your Mac and turns them into clean, timestamped Markdown transcripts. A Claude project reads them, so it can answer from what was actually said in class.
Stenny is an early test version. It has only been tested on a MacBook Air M4.
What Stenny does
Stenny is a menu bar app and a command-line tool for Macs with Apple Silicon. During a lecture, it records and writes a live draft of the transcript into Obsidian. Afterwards, it transcribes the whole recording again and saves a clean transcript with sections, a timestamp on every paragraph and a short summary.
The transcripts are written to be read by Claude. Each course's Claude project reads them straight from your vault and cites the lecture and the minute, like Lecture 3 [0:12:30].
Key features
- Runs on your Mac. Whisper large-v3-turbo transcribes on the graphics chip. Audio never leaves your Mac.
- Starts from your calendar. Ten minutes before a lecture, Stenny asks whether to record it. It never starts by itself.
- Doesn't lose audio. A native recorder writes straight to disk, and a backup microphone fills the gaps when your iPhone is busy.
- Gets your terms right. Each course has a glossary that fills itself from the slides and from terms that come up again and again.
- Doesn't invent text. The optional AI step adds headings, a summary and checked term fixes. It never rewrites what was said.
- Free. Transcription is local. The AI step costs nothing extra with Claude Code, or about $0.01 per lecture through the API.
How the parts fit together
| Part | What it does |
|---|---|
| Stenny.app | The menu bar app. Starts, pauses and stops recordings, and offers lectures from your calendar. |
stenny | The command-line tool. Transcribes, runs the AI step and keeps the course files up to date. |
| Your vault | Clean transcripts, summaries and course files, as Markdown. |
~/Lectures Data | Audio, raw output and settings, outside the vault. |
Next steps
- Quickstart: set up Stenny with Claude Code and record your first lecture.
- Recording a lecture: what happens before, during and after class.
- Studying with Claude: connect each course's Claude project to its transcripts.