LymeScribe App User Guide

Everything the desktop app does, from your first launch to naming the speakers in a two-hour meeting. One guide covers Mac, Windows and Linux — where a platform genuinely differs, there's a callout saying so.

Last updated 2026-08-31

macOS 14+Windows 10/11Linux x86_64

What the app is

LymeScribe is a desktop app that turns speech into text on hardware you own. It comes in one piece with two modes, and you choose which one you're in:

As a client, it's free forever. Point it at a LymeScribe server somewhere on your network — a colleague's machine running the paid hosting unlock, or a dedicated LymeScribe Server box — and you get the full experience: push-to-talk dictation into any app, batch file transcription, history, corrections. No account, no trial clock.
With the paid unlock, your own computer becomes the server. The app runs a speech engine locally and serves itself plus a few other devices on your LAN. Nothing is uploaded anywhere. See Self-hosting.

Either way, the audio and the transcript stay on machines you control. There is no LymeScribe cloud to opt out of.

Not sure which mode you want? Start as a client — it costs nothing and takes about two minutes. Choosing a tier walks through when hosting on your own computer is enough and when an office server makes more sense.

The chapters

Chapter 1Getting started Install on Mac, Windows or Linux; first launch; activating a license key; connecting to a server. Chapter 2Dictation Push-to-talk into any app: the Dictate card, hotkeys, and how the finished text reaches your cursor. Chapter 3Transcribing files Drop in recordings, pick an output format, and watch the queue work through them one at a time. Chapter 4Naming speakers Turn Speaker 1 into Dana by listening to a clip of each voice — plus the corrections dictionary. Chapter 5Self-hosting The paid unlock: running the engine on your own machine and serving other devices on your network. Chapter 6History & the archive Where transcripts live, exporting them, kept audio, and deleting things for good. Chapter 7AI tools Summaries, meeting minutes and translation, run against a local or cloud model you choose. Chapter 8Settings reference Every pane in the Settings window, row by row.

One guide, three platforms

The Mac app, the Windows client and the Linux client are the same product with the same layout: a toolbar, a capture band with a Dictate card and a Transcribe files card, one flat list of transcripts underneath, and a status strip along the bottom. Learn it on one machine and you know it on the others.

Where they diverge, it's for reasons the operating system imposes rather than choices we made — macOS asks for Accessibility permission before an app may type on your behalf, and the Linux desktop landscape varies enough that some capabilities depend on which desktop environment you run. Those places are marked with a platform callout in the chapter that covers them, and the Linux specifics are catalogued in full in the app's own Settings under the capability notices for your machine.

Setting up a server instead? The dedicated LymeScribe Server product has its own documentation — start at Server setup and the Server guide. This guide is about the desktop app.

Elsewhere in the docs

FAQ — the short answers.
From meeting to meeting notes — the end-to-end workflow for turning a recorded meeting into written notes.
Tuning speaker labels — getting better results out of hard recordings.
AI tools setup and prompt recipes.
Support — a real person answers.