Transcription happens on your Mac with no upload to the cloud, which means older machines take longer to finish the job than newer ones do.

Transcription speed is directly tied to your Mac's processor power. When you finish a recording, Coii AudioNotes transcribes it on your machine using a language model bundled with the app. This happens segment by segment while you listen to the audio or immediately after the call ends. The transcription model runs locally, which means your Mac is doing all the work. A modern Mac with an M3 or M4 chip can transcribe a one-hour meeting in 20-40 minutes. An older Intel Mac from 2015, or an early M1, might take two to three hours for the same meeting. This is not a slowness you can work around — it is the direct result of how much computing power your processor has.

Why local transcription takes time

The transcription model has to analyze every second of audio and convert it to text. That analysis happens frame by frame on your Mac. The model is listening to patterns of speech, identifying what language is being spoken, recognizing individual phonemes and words, and assembling them into a coherent transcript. For a one-hour meeting, that is 3,600 seconds of audio to analyze. On a machine with eight fast cores, this parallelizes well. On a machine with four slower cores, the same task takes much longer because fewer computations happen in parallel and each computation is slower.

Cloud transcription services like Otter avoid this problem by running the model on powerful servers in a data center. The server sends back the transcript to your Mac. It is faster because the server has more computing power, but it also means your audio leaves your Mac and is uploaded to their servers. Coii AudioNotes keeps your recording on your machine, which gives you privacy and offline capability, and that trade-off is slower transcription on older hardware.

What to expect on different Macs

On a Mac with an M-series chip (M1, M2, M3, M4), transcription is reasonably fast. A 30-minute meeting transcribes in 8-15 minutes. A one-hour meeting takes 20-40 minutes. These numbers assume your Mac is not doing other intensive work.

On an older Intel Mac — particularly those from 2015-2017 with quad-core or six-core processors — transcription takes much longer. The same one-hour meeting might take two to three hours. A 30-minute meeting might take 45-90 minutes. This is the realistic expectation; the transcription model is not optimized for older hardware and the performance gap is substantial.

On an Intel Mac from 2020-2021 with eight or ten cores, transcription is in between. It is slower than an M-series Mac, but faster than an older quad-core Intel. A one-hour meeting takes 45-90 minutes.

This is not a bug. It is the direct consequence of CPU power. You are not waiting for a network request or a cloud service to process your audio; you are waiting for your own machine to finish the work.

Checking how much CPU your transcription is using

Before you assume your Mac is broken or transcription is stuck, open Activity Monitor and look at the CPU usage. Transcription uses substantial CPU while it is running. You should see one or more processes using 20-40% of your machine's total CPU if transcription is active.

If CPU usage is very low (under 5%), transcription might be paused, stuck, or the process might have crashed. Restart the app and try again. If CPU usage is high but you are not seeing transcription progress, restart the app.

CPU usage during transcription is not a sign of a problem; it is a sign that your Mac is working hard on the task. This is expected and correct.

Closing other apps speeds up transcription

Transcription competes with every other app running on your Mac for CPU. If you have ten browser tabs open with videos playing, Slack is syncing, Mail is checking for new messages, and Finder is indexing, your Mac is distributing its CPU time among all of these tasks. Transcription gets a smaller slice, and the job takes longer.

Close your browser. Close Mail and Slack. Quit Finder's operations if you can. Plug your Mac in so it does not throttle CPU to save battery. Close any app that uses significant CPU. When you come back to an older Mac with only Coii AudioNotes running, transcription will finish faster.

On a newer Mac with spare cores, closing other apps has less impact because transcription can still get multiple cores. On an older Mac with fewer cores, every other app is stealing cores from transcription, and the slowdown is obvious.

Video calls with screen sharing add transcription overhead

If you were screen sharing during the call, the recording might have captured the screen as a video stream alongside the audio. This increases the file size and can sometimes affect transcription performance. Recordings that are audio-only transcribe faster than recordings that include video.

Coii AudioNotes records the audio your Mac can hear, so if you were on a Zoom call, the app captures both the call audio and your microphone. If Zoom was also capturing and sending video, the recording might be larger, but the transcription is still audio-only; the video is not analyzed. The transcription should not be significantly slower just because video was being captured.

RAM and disk space

Transcription uses RAM as it processes audio. On a Mac that is already using most of its RAM for other tasks, the system might start swapping to disk, which is much slower than RAM. Close other apps to free up RAM. If your Mac has only 8 GB of RAM, adding more RAM can help, though the limiting factor is usually the CPU, not the RAM.

Similarly, if your Mac's drive is nearly full, it might be slower to read and write files during transcription. Free up disk space or use an external drive if your internal drive is low.

Using Coii AudioNotes with an older Mac

If you have an older Mac, plan for slower transcription. Record your meetings, and let transcription happen while you do something else — take a break, work on email, or let your Mac finish overnight. Transcription will complete eventually, even if it takes a few hours.

If waiting is not an option and speed is critical, you have alternatives:

• Use a cloud transcription service like Otter, which is faster but uploads your audio.
• Upgrade to a newer Mac if you use Coii AudioNotes regularly.
• Record the meeting and transcribe it later when you have time.

The privacy and offline capability of Coii AudioNotes come with the trade-off of slower transcription on older hardware. That is a design choice, not a limitation you can work around. But the transcription will happen.

GPU acceleration and other optimization paths

Some users expect transcription to use GPU acceleration on their Mac, but Coii AudioNotes uses the CPU for transcription. This is by design: it simplifies deployment and keeps the system working on every Mac regardless of GPU. Newer Macs with M3 and M4 chips have very capable CPUs with many cores, which is why transcription is fast on them.

GPU acceleration would theoretically make transcription faster, but it comes with trade-offs. Not every older Mac has usable GPU capabilities for this kind of work. Supporting GPU transcription across the varied hardware landscape would make the app more complex. The current approach is simple and universal: it works on every Mac from Ventura onward, it just takes longer on older hardware.

If speed is critical and your Mac is very old, upgrading to a newer machine is the most effective solution. An M-series Mac is not just twice as fast; it is often five to ten times faster for transcription due to the number of cores and their speed.

Planning for slow transcription

If you know your Mac is older and transcription will be slow, plan accordingly. Batch your important recordings and transcribe them overnight or on the weekend when you do not need the Mac. Record a series of meetings, then let them all transcribe while your Mac sits idle. This way you get all your transcripts without having to wait for each one individually. This planning strategy works very well.

For time-sensitive meetings, you could record and get a quick partial transcript manually, then let the full transcription happen in the background. Or you could use a cloud transcription service for the urgent ones, and Coii AudioNotes for the ones where privacy matters more than speed.

The trade-off of local transcription is that you own your data and your Mac never uploads anything. Slower transcription on older hardware is part of that privacy-first design.

When transcription is painfully slow

If transcription is taking longer than expected — more than three hours for a one-hour meeting on any Mac — check:

1. Open Activity Monitor and look for CPU usage. Is something else consuming most of your CPU?
2. Is your Mac throttling CPU due to thermal issues? Check that your vents are not blocked.
3. Are you out of RAM or disk space? Check the storage and memory tabs in Activity Monitor.
4. Did the transcription process crash? Check the app's window to see if it is still running.

If nothing obvious is wrong, restart your Mac and try again. Sometimes the system gets into a state where it is not allocating resources efficiently. A restart usually fixes it.

If you have consistent issues with transcription on an older Mac, reach out. But in most cases, transcription will complete, just slowly, and the result will be accurate. The accuracy does not suffer from slow transcription; the model is the same whether it takes 30 minutes or 3 hours to complete.

What it costs, what it runs on

Coii AudioNotes is $19 once, covering three of your Macs, with a 30-day trial that needs no card and no account. It runs on macOS 13 Ventura or later on Apple Silicon and Intel. Transcription is faster on newer Macs, but works on every supported version. The key is managing your expectations. Your older Mac will transcribe accurately; it will just take longer. How-to-record-a-meeting-on-a-mac covers the full recording workflow. How-to-transcribe-a-meeting-without-uploading-it walks through transcription in detail, and best-meeting-notes-apps-without-a-bot rounds up local transcription tools and their speeds. Offline-meeting-transcription-mac explains why transcription on your machine gives you privacy, and how-to-export-a-transcript shows how to save transcripts for later use.