Battery & heat
The rules that keep live transcription from heating the Mac or draining the battery. The recording itself is never slowed or stopped.
The Battery & heat page holds the rules that keep live transcription from heating the Mac or emptying the battery: it is what Details… next to Pace on Recording opens. None of the rules ever slows or stops the recording: they only change how quickly the live lines appear.
Pace
The same Pace control as on Recording, in the same words: Automatic turns all three rules below on; Keep up keeps the lines on time on battery, but still slows down when the Mac is hot and keeps the battery guard; Gentle always lets other work go first. Any other mix of the switches below reads Custom, here, on Recording and in the list of pages. Custom is shown, never picked: choose a pace to go back to one.
Slow down when the Mac is hot
On by default. When macOS reports the Mac as hot, live lines arrive in longer blocks, a little later. The transcript after the meeting is as good as before.
When to change it: turn it off only if you need every line on time and do not mind a hot, loud Mac.
Transcribe gently on battery
On by default. On battery or in Low Power Mode, a live meeting transcribes at the Gentle pace: lines in blocks, a few seconds behind. On the charger it keeps up again.
When to change it: turn it off if you read the live transcript closely on battery and accept the drain.
Battery guard
On by default. If the battery drains fast during a meeting, that meeting switches to After the meeting: the recording continues, the live transcript stops, and the transcript is made from the recording after the meeting, when After recording lets it run. PrivateGoat tells you when it switches, and Resume Live Transcription on the recording controls brings the live lines back.
When to change it: turn it off if a live transcript matters more than battery, for example when you present from it.
The budget
Not a switch: live transcription never takes more than about a third of the Mac's time, so the rest stays with your call and your other apps.
What about after the meeting?
These rules cover the meeting itself. The work after it — reading the recording again, naming speakers, the summary — waits for the charger or a Mac not in use by default; that is set on After recording.
For the curious
- The budget caps live decoding at 30 % of the wall clock, measured over a sliding window; above it, decoding pauses until its share has fallen again.
- "Hot" is macOS's own thermal state. When hot, live lines come in longer blocks without provisional words; the Gentle pace decodes in twelve-second blocks, also without provisional words.
- The battery guard trips when the battery falls faster than 8 % in ten minutes during a meeting.
- On Apple silicon the Neural Engine takes most of the work off the graphics chip: in our measurement on a ten-minute meeting, over 90 % less, at the same accuracy. These rules apply on top of it.
- A smaller Live model under Transcript quality → Advanced also helps on Macs without the Neural Engine.
What leaves your Mac
Nothing. These rules read the Mac's power and temperature state locally and change only how the speech model is scheduled.
Related
- Recording — Pace: Automatic, Gentle or Keep up.
- Transcript quality — the model and the Neural Engine.
- Recording a meeting — the two tracks, always recorded in full.
After recording
What happens once a recording ends — the final transcript, speaker names, the summary, action items — and when that work runs: right away, on the charger or when the Mac is not in use.
Speakers
How names get onto transcript lines: the call window, voices, people in the room, names said aloud, and your corrections.