Know who's speaking — by name.

From “Them-1” to real names

Every recording starts the same way: echo99 keeps your microphone and the other side of the call as separate tracks, labels your mic “Me”, and splits the other voices into “Them-1”, “Them-2”, and so on. Speaker identification is the layer on top: it turns those anonymous “Them-N” labels into the actual names of people you’ve met before.

How recognition works — on your Mac

Put a name to a voice once, and echo99 stores a compact voiceprint for that person in your local gallery. On every later recording it compares each speaker against that gallery and, when a voice is a confident match, labels the transcript with the person’s name automatically. There is no cloud service in the loop — the matching runs entirely on the Mac in front of you.

When echo99 is not sure, it deliberately does nothing: the speaker stays “Them-N” rather than risk putting the wrong name on the wrong words. Identity only ever adds a name it’s confident about.

You stay in control

• Manage People — name, rename, or remove anyone in your gallery from a single menu-bar window.
• No names without you — a voice becomes a named person only because you named it in Manage People; anyone you haven’t named stays “Them-N”. Speaker recognition is off by default.
• Corrections are easy — relabel a speaker whenever a match isn’t what you expected; your correction is the source of truth.

Private by design

Voiceprints are biometric data, and echo99 treats them that way: they are stored locally on your Mac, never uploaded, and never used to train anything. They leave your Mac only if you export them yourself (Manage People → Export). Everything else about speaker identification happens locally — like recording and transcription — so it works with Wi-Fi off and nothing is sent to anyone else’s server on its own.

Honest limits

• Voice matching is strong but not infallible: very similar voices, or poor audio, may stay “Them-N” until you name them.
• Recognition improves with a clean sample — the clearer the recording you first name someone from, the better later matches will be.
• It identifies the people you have named; it does not attempt to guess the identity of strangers.

New to echo99? See getting started, or read how local transcription keeps every conversation on your Mac.