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# conversate
- URL: https://donotknock.app/apps/conversate/
- Published: 2026-09-03T05:26:16.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-05T07:11:16.000Z
- Author: NobodyHome298
- Tags: Apps

# Introducing Conversate: A Real-Time AI Co-Pilot for Mac & Windows

If you spend a significant amount of time in remote meetings, conducting interviews, or listening to live streams, you know the friction of trying to take notes while actually staying present in the conversation. I wanted a tool that didn't just record what was being said, but actively helped me understand and synthesize it on the fly.  
Today, I’m open-sourcing **Conversate** (v1.1.0), a desktop utility I built to act as a real-time conversational co-pilot for both Mac and Windows.  
Building this was a deep dive into rapid prototyping and vibe coding—pushing the limits of what AI-assisted development environments can do when bridging local hardware APIs with blazing-fast cloud intelligence.  

## What does it do?

At its core, Conversate captures dual-channel audio—your local microphone and your system's internal loopback audio—simultaneously, without requiring any third-party virtual audio cables. It streams this to Deepgram to generate a live, speaker-diarized transcript.  
But transcription is just the foundation. The real magic happens with the AI integration:  

- **Proactive Context Cues:** As people speak, a background engine analyzes a sliding window of the transcript. Without you ever typing a prompt, it surfaces relevant concepts, entity bios, or quick answers directly on your screen.
- **Universal AI Support:** You bring your own API keys. It supports Google Gemini, but you can seamlessly switch to any OpenAI-compatible endpoint. Point it at Groq's Llama 3 models, for example, and you get near-instantaneous proactive cues that easily bypass standard rate limits.
- **Intelligent Summaries:** The moment you hit stop, the app processes the raw, unpunctuated speech into properly capitalized, formatted paragraphs. It groups thoughts by speaker and generates a structured summary with actionable next steps.
- **Local & Private:** Everything is saved locally to your `Documents` folder as Markdown logs, complete with a one-click PDF export. Your audio goes to your transcription provider, and your text goes to your LLM. Nothing is stored on external databases.

## The Build Process

The biggest hurdle during development wasn't just mixing the audio streams; it was making the intelligence efficient. Early builds hammered the LLM with every spoken sentence, which immediately triggered rate limits.  
The breakthrough was designing an intelligent local heuristic—a pre-flight check that only pings the AI when actual context is needed. Pairing this with a beautifully native Light/Dark mode UI in Electron resulted in a cross-platform desktop utility that feels incredibly responsive and native to your operating system, whether you're on a Mac or a PC.  

## Try it out

If you want to give it a spin, the project is completely open-source.  

1. Head over to the [**GitHub Releases page**](https://github.com/donotknock/conversate/releases?ref=donotknock.app).
2. Download the installer for your system: `Conversate-1.1.0-arm64.dmg` for Mac, or `Conversate-1.1.0-Setup.exe` for Windows.
3. Install the app, plug in your API keys in the Settings, and start capturing.