Yes. Lectern is MIT licensed, with no account, no ads and no paid tier. If it saves you a study session, you can tip on Ko-fi.
Click any word.
Hear the moment.
Lectern records your lectures, transcribes them on your computer and writes study notes. Every word and every note is tied to the audio, so you can jump to where something was said.
Free and open source. No account. Nothing leaves your computer.
Try it on a real transcript
This is Lectern's own output for an 84-second sample lecture, read by a computer voice. Press play, then click any word or note. Mistakes are left in, like “Christie” for cristae: that is what the audio link is for.
0:00 / 1:24
Intro to Cell Biology, Lecture 6
Notes
Transcript
Loading the transcript…
From a lecture to notes
Three steps, all on your computer. The recording is safe the whole way, and every note still knows the second it came from.
Record
Audio goes to disk in 60-second pieces. A crash, a closed lid or a dead battery does not lose the lecture.
Transcribe
whisper.cpp turns speech into text on your computer. On an M1 Mac, a 50-minute lecture takes about 7 minutes.
Study
Notes, key terms and a quiz, each one linked to the moment in the audio where it was said.
Inside Lectern
Each class is a real folder, like Lectures/BIO 101, holding plain audio, text and Markdown files you can open without Lectern.
What you get
Your classes 
stay as plain folders, the timeline 
fills in as you listen, and every note 
jumps to its second.
- Lid-close safe. Shut the laptop and recording pauses with the mic off. Open it to carry on or finish.
- Small on disk. About 15 MB per lecture-hour, after the original passes an eight-step check.
- Honest notes. A note is kept only if it is built from words the lecture used.
- Your speed. 0.5× to 2× with natural pitch, remembered for every lecture. Space, arrows and brackets drive it.
- Export. One Markdown file with notes, terms, quiz and transcript, or the audio on its own.
Nothing leaves your computer.
No cloud, no account, no analytics. Recording, transcription and notes all run on your computer. The one download is the speech model, when you press the button for it. The Mac app also checks once a day for a newer version by fetching one small file, which shows only what any web request shows, and you can turn that off in Settings. If a later version lets you plug in your own API key for notes, it will be off by default and labelled, because that sends text away.
Questions
Yes. Open the disk image, drag Lectern to Applications and open it. It is signed and notarized by Apple, so it opens without warnings. It needs an Apple Silicon Mac (M1 or newer). Press ⌘L from any app to start or stop recording.
Yes, as a beta. Unzip it, double-click Lectern.bat and your browser opens Lectern: no Python or other installs. In Settings, download the speech model it recommends. Windows may warn about an unknown publisher the first time (More info, then Run anyway). It has had far less testing than it will get, so please report what breaks. Linux runs from the source code.
That depends on your school and your lecturer, so ask first. Many schools allow it for study or accessibility. Lectern shows a reminder before your first recording.
Clear speech in a quiet room comes out well. Names and jargon can go wrong, like “Christie” in the demo. Because every word plays its own audio, you can check anything in a second.
The beta is not code-signed yet, so SmartScreen shows “unknown publisher”. Press More info, then Run anyway. Download it only from this page or the GitHub releases page, and compare the SHA-256 checksum listed with the release.
Found a bug? Tell me.
Something broke, an idea, a lecture where Lectern let you down: I read every message. For business, write to lenny@lqoro.com.
Take it to your next lecture.
Mac: version 0.2.1, 43 MB disk image, Apple Silicon, macOS 12 or newer. Windows beta: version 0.1.1, 101 MB zip, 64-bit Windows 10 or 11. Older versions and checksums are on the releases page. By downloading you agree to the terms; read the recording notice before your first lecture.
