Tonal Recall CLI
Your recordings, in your terminal and your AI.
A fast macOS command-line tool that searches, reads, and exports everything Tonal Recall has captured — and connects your AI assistant to it. It runs outside the app, fully on-device.
Search everything you've heard
Instant full-text search across every transcript, ranked by relevance, with typo-tolerant matching.
Read & export
Pull up any meeting in full, or export the transcript to SRT, VTT, Markdown, plain text, or JSON.
Built for AI assistants
One command wires Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or Claude Desktop to your recordings — no config.
Control the app
Pause or resume recording, set the weekly schedule, and trigger transcription from the terminal.
Fast at any scale
A local SQLite index keeps search instant across thousands of meetings — every query stays on disk.
Private by design
No network of any kind. It only reads files Tonal Recall already wrote to your Mac.
Install
Download the installer above, double-click it, and click through — it places the tonalrecall command on your PATH. Then open Terminal and confirm it found your recordings:
tonalrecall doctor
You need the Tonal Recall macOS app installed (the CLI reads the recordings it captures).
Point it at your recordings
The CLI auto-detects your recordings folder. If you keep them somewhere custom, set it once:
tonalrecall config set captures-dir "/path/to/your/recordings"
Connect your AI assistant
One command installs everything the assistant needs to use your recordings. Pick your client:
# shell-capable agents run the CLI directly tonalrecall install-skill --client claude-code tonalrecall install-skill --client codex tonalrecall install-skill --client cursor # Claude Desktop is wired via its MCP config tonalrecall install-skill --client claude-desktop
After that, just ask your assistant about a meeting — “what did we decide about the budget?” — and it searches and reads your transcripts for you. Add --print to preview what would be installed without writing anything.
Commands
Every command takes --json for clean, machine-readable output.
tonalrecall list | Your meetings, newest first. |
tonalrecall recent | The most recent meeting, in full. |
tonalrecall get <ref> | One meeting by id or fuzzy title. |
tonalrecall search <query…> | Full-text search across all transcripts. |
tonalrecall export <ref> | Render a transcript to srt / vtt / md / txt / json. |
tonalrecall audio <ref> | The meeting's audio file path and duration. |
tonalrecall stats | Totals: meetings, duration, words, busiest day, top terms. |
tonalrecall rename <ref> <title> | Give a meeting a title. |
tonalrecall pause / resume | Pause or resume recording. |
tonalrecall status | The app's current recording state. |
A <ref> is an id or a title — a title is matched fuzzily, so get "design sync" just works.
Examples
Find what was said about something
tonalrecall search budget --context 1
Read your latest meeting
tonalrecall recent --text
Export a meeting as subtitles
tonalrecall export "design sync" --format srt -o design-sync.srt
The CLI never records or transcribes — that's always the app's job. It reads your recordings, edits titles, and asks the app to do anything else. Nothing ever leaves your Mac.