Terms, privacy and licences

By downloading or using Lectern you agree to these terms. Lectern is free, open-source software by lqoro, released under the MIT License.

Transcripts and notes can be wrong

Speech recognition and AI-written notes make mistakes: misheard words, missed sentences, wrong terms or numbers. Check important details against the recording or your course materials. Do not rely on Lectern alone for medical, clinical, legal, safety or exam-critical information.

No warranty

Lectern is provided “as is”, without warranty of any kind, as set out in the MIT License. Keep your own backups of recordings that matter to you. The authors are not liable for lost or damaged recordings or any other loss arising from the software.

Beta and unsigned builds

Builds marked beta, including the Windows version, are early and less tested. The Windows beta is not code-signed yet, so Windows SmartScreen asks you to confirm before it opens; the Mac app is signed and notarized by Apple. Download Lectern only from the GitHub releases page or this website, and compare the SHA-256 checksums listed with each release.

Donations

Donations through Ko-fi are voluntary gifts to support development. They do not buy a licence, features, support or any other benefit, and Lectern stays free whether or not you donate. Ko-fi handles payments under its own terms; refunds, if any, follow Ko-fi's policies.

Changes

These terms may be updated. The current version is always on this page and in the app under Settings, Legal, with the date it changed.

You are responsible for what you record. Laws on recording conversations differ by country and by state. In some places, for example several US states including California, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Washington, everyone being recorded may have to consent. Other places require one party's consent, and some treat classrooms differently.

Schools and instructors set their own rules too. Many do not allow lectures to be recorded without permission, unless recording is an approved accommodation, for example through your school's disability services office. Lectures and slides may be protected by copyright, and some schools forbid sharing them.

Before you record or import a lecture:

• check your school's policy and your instructor's rules, and ask permission when in doubt;
• follow the recording laws where you are;
• use recordings for your own study, and don't share or publish them without permission.

Lectern does not check any of this for you, and it shows this notice before your first recording.

The app collects nothing

• No account, no analytics, no telemetry, no ads. Lectern sends no data to its developer or anyone else.
• Recording, transcription and study notes all run on your computer. Audio, transcripts and notes are ordinary files in your Lectures folder, yours to keep, move or delete.
• The app's window is served by a small server on your own computer that only accepts connections from that computer.
• The app goes online only when you ask: to download a speech model when you press Download (from Hugging Face), or when you click a link, which opens in your browser. The Mac app also checks once a day whether a newer version exists, by downloading one small file from this site; that request shows your IP address, your system language and the Lectern version and carries no recordings, transcripts or other personal details. You can turn the daily check off in Settings. The Windows beta has no update check.
• Copy diagnostics puts system details (computer model, memory, versions, never lecture content) on your clipboard. Nothing is sent; you decide whether to paste it into a bug report.
• Phone mode, when you turn it on, makes Lectern reachable from devices on your local network, protected by an access key. Use it only on a network you trust.

This website

• No cookies, no analytics, no ads, no tracking pixels. Fonts, pictures and the demo are served from this site, not from third parties.
• The site is hosted by Vercel. Like any web host, Vercel processes your IP address and request details to deliver pages and keep the service secure, under Vercel's privacy policy.
• Downloads and the source code are on GitHub, under GitHub's privacy statement. Donations go through Ko-fi, under Ko-fi's privacy policy; Lectern never sees payment details.
• The contact form sends nothing by itself and nothing is stored on this site: it opens your own email app (or Gmail, if you choose) with your message filled in, and you decide whether to send it. Email you send to lenny@lqoro.com is used only to reply to you. The X and Instagram links open those services, under their own privacy policies.

Questions and requests

Lectern holds no personal data about you, so there is nothing to access or delete on our side. For questions, write to me at lenny@lqoro.com or open an issue on GitHub.

Lectern

Copyright © 2026 lqoro. Released under the MIT License:

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE
SOFTWARE.

Inside the downloads

The Mac app and the Windows beta bundle open-source components, each under its own licence. The full texts ship with every download (in the app under Settings, Legal, Full licence texts) and are listed in the project's third-party notices.

FFmpeg source. FFmpeg's complete source for the shipped version is at github.com/FFmpeg/FFmpeg (tag n8.1.3), and a copy is attached to each Lectern release that includes FFmpeg. Lectern runs FFmpeg as separate programs, so you can swap in your own build.

Models. Speech models (OpenAI Whisper weights in ggml format, MIT) are downloaded only when you ask. The optional notes model, Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct, is under the Qwen Research License, which permits research and evaluation use only; without it, Lectern builds notes from the lecture's own sentences.

This website

• Type: Albert Sans by the Albert Sans Project Authors, SIL Open Font License 1.1.
• Photo: “University of Edinburgh Lecture Theatre” by Open Ed, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Resized.
• Photo: “Rutherfords lecture theatre Christchurch May 2025” by Heidi Meudt, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Resized.
• The demo lecture is a script written for this site and read by a computer voice. Its transcript and notes are Lectern's own unedited output. The app screenshots show demo lectures, not real students' recordings.

Apple, Mac and macOS are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. Windows is a trademark of the Microsoft group of companies. Whisper is associated with OpenAI, Qwen with Alibaba Cloud, FFmpeg with the FFmpeg project, Ko-fi with Ko-fi Labs and GitHub with GitHub, Inc. Lectern is an independent project and is not affiliated with or endorsed by any of them, or by any school or university.