Starting a Recording
PressCmd+R (or Ctrl+R on Windows) or click the record button on the overlay pill. Raven immediately begins capturing both your microphone and system audio.
While recording, the overlay pill shows a pulsing indicator, and the system tray icon changes to reflect the active state.
What Gets Captured
Raven runs two audio streams simultaneously:| Stream | What it captures | Label in transcript |
|---|---|---|
| Microphone | Your voice | ”You” |
| System audio | Everything playing through your speakers - Zoom, Meet, Teams, YouTube, etc. | ”Them” |
Echo Cancellation
Without echo cancellation, the remote speaker’s voice would leak from your speakers into your microphone and appear as duplicate text. Raven runs both streams through an echo cancellation pipeline that removes this bleed, producing clean separated audio. Echo cancellation activates automatically when you start recording. If conditions are poor (high latency or system load), it temporarily bypasses to avoid distortion - raw mic audio passes through without processing until conditions stabilize.Live Transcription
Clean audio is transcribed in real-time. Transcripts appear in the overlay as they happen:- Interim results appear in italic while someone is still speaking
- Final results replace interims once the speaker pauses
- Same-speaker merging combines consecutive utterances within a few seconds to avoid fragmentation
- Speaker labels stay consistent - your voice is always “You”, theirs is always “Them”
Supported Languages
Raven supports transcription in 20+ languages: English, Hindi, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Arabic, Bengali, Dutch, Polish, Russian, Tamil, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese There’s also a Multilingual mode that auto-detects the language being spoken. You can set the transcription language and output language independently in Settings > Language.Enhanced Transcription (Pro)
Raven Pro uses an enhanced transcription pipeline with multiple providers and automatic fallback:- Meeting detection (Apple Silicon Macs) - auto-detects Zoom, Teams, and Meet meetings and captures audio directly from the meeting application
- AssemblyAI - high-accuracy transcription with turn detection
- Deepgram - reliable fallback if the above aren’t available
Stopping a Recording
PressCmd+R again or click the stop button. Raven:
- Stops capturing audio
- Saves the full transcript and any AI responses
- Generates an AI summary and title for the session
- In Raven Pro, syncs the session to the cloud
Permissions
macOS
Raven needs two permissions to capture audio:| Permission | Why |
|---|---|
| Microphone | Capture your voice |
| Screen Recording | Capture system audio |