Lyonesse Review: Offline AI Transcription and Meeting Notes for iPhone and Mac

Lyonesse is an Apple-platform app that records or imports audio, transcribes it, summarises it and lets you ask questions about your notes, PDFs, Office files and photos, all described as running on the device. The App Store lists it as "Lyonesse: AI Transcript & Chat" in Productivity, from the seller Josip Markovic (copyright "Markovic Software, obrt za usluge"); the website, privacy policy and terms name no person or company. The listing first appeared on 31 October 2025, and version 2.0.1 on 3 September 2026 renamed the app from Inscribe to Lyonesse.

The App Store title varies by storefront, for example "Lyonesse: KI Transkript & Chat" in Germany and "Lyonesse: AI文字起こし・チャット" in Japan; all refer to the same app.

Lyonesse is an App Store download for iPhone, iPad and Mac; no Android, Windows or web version is listed.

The App Store lists iOS, iPadOS and macOS 26.0 as the minimum, and the maker says the on-device AI works best on recent Apple hardware.

The steps follow the maker's own description; PromptQuorum has not run them.

Every item below comes from the App Store description, its version history or the maker's website; none has been independently tested.

Lyonesse links two measurement posts from its home page; both were run by the maker and neither has been reproduced by PromptQuorum.

In the speech benchmark, published on 15 July 2026, the maker compared eight engines on the English LibriSpeech corpus on one Apple M2 Pro. It reports word error rates on clean and noisier speech of 2.12% and 4.56% for Apple SpeechAnalyzer and 2.51% and 4.28% for Parakeet TDT v3. It also reports that version 1.8.9 dropped Whisper and that the automatic mode prefers Apple SpeechAnalyzer where a language is supported. The post states that it covers English only, read audiobook speech rather than meetings, and one machine.

In the upload measurement, the maker played a 10-minute meeting clip on one Mac and logged network bytes per process. It reports that Lyonesse 2.0.4 sent 0.02 MB while recording, against 115.7 MB for Notion AI Meeting Notes 7.39.0. The post calls itself a vendor self-test of one network on one day, with two of five planned apps, bytes only and no security audit, and notes that Lyonesse also downloaded about 18 MB of speaker-detection models once and synced about 0.4 MB of note text through iCloud.

The privacy policy, last updated on 9 October 2026, says audio recordings never leave the device and that transcription, summaries and document analysis run on it, with no data sent to external servers for processing. No account is needed, and the policy states that Lyonesse does not collect recordings, transcripts, documents, names, emails, location or contacts. Its line saying that no third-party analytics are integrated is out of date, according to the maker, who is correcting it.

Some data does move. The maker says the app sends anonymous usage events to Mixpanel and that RevenueCat handles subscriptions, never audio, transcripts or notes. The policy describes anonymized usage statistics (app opens, feature use, device type, system and app version) and crash reports; the App Store privacy labels list device ID, product interaction and crash data as collected and not linked to you. Transcripts and summaries sync between your own devices through iCloud, which the maker says is on by default, and device backups include app data. The maker says it runs no sync servers and cannot see iCloud data. Apple Intelligence, the App Store, iCloud and backups fall under Apple's own policies.

Lyonesse is a broad, actively updated way to get transcripts, meeting notes and document chat on an iPhone or Mac, and its Apple Watch app can record on its own, with the iPhone doing the transcription later. A free recording lets you try it, and a lifetime-purchase option sits next to the subscriptions. Against that, it is closed-source, comes from one independent developer, needs a 26-series operating system, rests its privacy and speed claims on the maker's own measurements, and still carries outdated wording in its terms, privacy policy and App Store text, which the maker says he is correcting. It suits people with recent Apple hardware who want account-free notes and can test the free recording first; anyone recording sensitive or regulated material should read the privacy policy and the sync setting themselves before relying on it.