Scribe

Scribe is a Windows desktop app that silently tracks your work in the background and listens to your meetings locally — no bot ever joins your calls, and your microphone stays off.

Features

• Background work tracking — a persistent native watcher streams the foreground window once per second; the app logs window switches to daily CSV files and never silently dies (watchdog + auto-respawn, crash guards, idle/lock/sleep awareness).
• Meetings (listen-only, no bot) — captures Windows system loopback audio (whatever you hear in Zoom/Teams/VooV/Meet) locally on your PC. The microphone is never opened and the meeting app cannot detect the capture. Live transcripts stream to the dashboard every ~20 seconds; stopping generates an AI summary plus suggested tasks that are only added to your task list after you approve them.
• AI insights — daily smart summaries, morning action plans, and a chat assistant over your activity data (Gemini, with multi-key rotation and model fallback).
• Tasks & reminders — manual task list with desktop notification reminders.
• Keep-awake — while tracking (and especially during meetings) the app holds an OS power request so the laptop doesn't sleep mid-capture. Toggle from the tray menu.
• Invisible in screen shares — the dashboard uses Windows content protection, so it is excluded from Zoom/Teams/OBS screen captures (tray toggle).

Architecture

electron-app/
  main.js               App lifecycle: tray, windows, power, crash guards
  ActiveWindow.cs/.exe  Native foreground-window watcher (--watch mode streams once/sec)
  src/
    tracker.js          Persistent watcher + watchdog + idle/lock/sleep handling + CSV
    meetings.js         Meeting sessions: capture window, transcription queue, summaries
    apiServer.js        Local Express API on http://localhost:3001
    ai.js               Gemini client: key rotation + model fallback (text + audio)
    logger.js           Rotating file logger (userData/logs/app.log)
    util.js             Local-time helpers, atomic JSON read/write
  capture/
    capture.html/.js    Hidden window: system loopback → 16kHz WAV chunks → main process
frontend/               React dashboard (Vite) — built into electron-app/dashboard

Data lives in %APPDATA%/scribe/logs/ (dev) or %APPDATA%/Scribe/logs/ (installed). On first run Scribe copies (never deletes) legacy data from the old electron-app/Work Tracker folders — daily yyyy-MM-dd.csv activity logs, meetings/*.json, tasks.json, summaries.json, settings.json, app.log.

Setup

1. electron-app/.env — Gemini keys (already configured):

   GEMINI_API_KEY=...
   GEMINI_API_KEYS=key1,key2
   

2. Install and run:

   cd frontend && npm install && npm run build
   cd ../electron-app && npm install && npm run sync-dashboard && npm start
   

3. Rebuild the native watcher after editing ActiveWindow.cs:

   npm run build-watcher
   

4. Package the installer: npm run build (electron-builder, NSIS).

Meetings — how it works

1. Start capture from the tray menu or the dashboard's Meetings tab (before or during a call).
2. A hidden window captures system loopback audio only (mic stays off) via WebAudio at 16 kHz mono and emits ~20-second WAV chunks. Silent chunks are dropped locally.
3. The main process transcribes each chunk with Gemini and appends segments to the live transcript (visible in the dashboard within ~20–40 s of speech).
4. Stop capture → remaining chunks finish transcribing → a Markdown summary (Summary, Key Points, Decisions, Action Items) is generated automatically, plus suggested tasks you can approve or dismiss. Everything is stored locally in meetings/<id>.json.

Reliability design

• One persistent watcher process instead of spawning a new process every 2 s.
• Watchdog respawns the watcher (with backoff) if it exits or goes quiet for 45 s.
• powerMonitor marks (Idle), (Locked), (Suspended) periods so durations stay honest.
• Timestamps and file names use local time (the old UTC scheme put early-morning activity in the previous day's file).
• uncaughtException/unhandledRejection are logged and recovered, never fatal.
• Express port conflicts retry; JSON files are written atomically (temp + rename).
• powerSaveBlocker keeps the machine awake while tracking; display-sleep is additionally blocked during meetings.