Notes from the cockpit.
What we figured out building MeetPing. Engineering writeups on Parakeet, phonetic matching, and FluidAudio. Product reasoning on the 30+30 window. Honest guides for people in too many meetings.
On-device vs cloud transcription, picked apart
Cloud wins on model size and language coverage. On-device wins on latency, IT review, and the cost line on the next invoice.
Two meetings at the same time: a working setup
The cheap version is two browser windows and luck. The version that survives a week is audio routing, a quiet mic, and a watcher on both transcripts.
Zoom meeting keyword alerts that actually fire on time
Zoom captions are post-hoc. A keyword alert needs to fire inside two seconds of the word being spoken or it is useless.
The Mac meeting notification app, explained
A Mac menubar app that listens locally, knows when a call starts, and pings you the second a watched word fires. No bot, no cloud, no subscription.
How to get notified when your name is mentioned in a Zoom meeting
Manual attention fails on call three. After-the-fact transcripts are too late. A live keyword listener is the only thing that fires while it still matters.
The overemployed meeting survival kit
Two calls deep, three browsers open, and the meeting where someone's about to ask you something. A workflow that holds up.
Running Parakeet TDT v3 on Mac with FluidAudio
Streaming chunks, ANE constraints, and the ~1.4 s first-partial budget that shapes everything downstream.
Mac meeting tools, honestly compared (2026)
Six tools for six different problems. Notes vs alerts vs dictation vs noise. Pick the right one and stop stacking.
Why 30 seconds before, 30 seconds after
Working memory holds about 30 seconds of conversational thread. Below that you're rewinding. Above it you're reading.
Phonetic match fixes name detection
Parakeet hears 'Ogtay' as 'octaye' or 'october'. Soundex maps both to O323. Levenshtein catches the rest.
Why on-device ASR matters for meeting tools
Cloud ASR adds 250 ms of round-trip and a security review. ANE-resident Parakeet runs locally and never opens a socket.