Direct answer — Inscribe vs Weesper Transcribe: which should you pick? Inscribe, the on-device transcription app, was renamed Lyonesse in 2026; get-inscribe.com now redirects to lyonesse.app. Lyonesse adds AI summaries, action items and system-audio capture across iPhone, iPad and Mac, but requires OS 26. Weesper Transcribe stays a macOS 13 file transcriber with a one-time Pro upgrade, nine export formats and 57 transcription languages.
If you are comparing Inscribe vs Weesper Transcribe, the first thing worth knowing is that one of the two names has changed underneath you.
That is not a technicality. It changes which website carries the current pricing, which App Store listing you are reading reviews of, and — in this case — whether the app will install on your Mac at all.
This comparison sorts out the naming mess first, then puts the two apps side by side on what actually decides a purchase: platform requirements, output, permissions and price.
Is Inscribe still called Inscribe?
No. The on-device transcription app published as Inscribe — Offline Transcription is now listed as Lyonesse: AI Transcript & Chat. It was renamed, not replaced.
Two pieces of evidence from the vendor’s own surfaces settle it. The App Store listing id6754086711 still carries the original bundle identifier com.get-inscribe.inscribe under the new track name, and Apple’s lookup data returns https://lyonesse.app/ as the seller URL.
The second is blunter: the old marketing domain get-inscribe.com answers a 308 Permanent Redirect to lyonesse.app. A permanent redirect is the vendor telling crawlers the brand moved.
So any 2026 review of “Inscribe” as a transcription app is really a review of Lyonesse, and every roundup still using the old name is pointing at a pricing page that moved.
There are two unrelated apps called Inscribe
This is the part that sends people in circles. A second, completely separate macOS app is also called Inscribe, at getinscribe.app, with no connection to the transcription app above.
| Inscribe (getinscribe.app) | Inscribe → Lyonesse (get-inscribe.com) | |
|---|---|---|
| What it does | Live dictation into the frontmost app via a hotkey | Recording, file transcription, summaries, Q&A |
| Distribution | Direct download | App Store listing |
| Minimum OS | macOS 15.0 | OS 26.0 |
| Price on its own page | ”Completely Free” | Free tier plus paid in-app purchases |
If you searched for Inscribe offline transcription on Mac and landed on a hotkey dictation tool, that is the collision. Only the second column is a file transcription product, and only the second column is comparable with Weesper Transcribe.
What does Lyonesse do that a plain transcriber does not?
It turns a recording into structured output, not just text. The App Store description positions it as “a private workspace for the things you record and the documents you read”, and the AI layer is the point of the product.
Its own listing describes summaries “in the style you want: concise, bullets, action items, or a structured outline”, on-device speaker labels, full-screen live captions, and a Q&A chat across your whole library with citations back to the source.
Three capabilities stand out as genuinely beyond file transcription:
- An action-item pipeline — extracted items go to Apple Reminders, so a meeting becomes tasks rather than a wall of text.
- System-audio capture on Mac — it transcribes a call or a video playing on the machine without joining as a participant.
- Document ingestion — PDFs, Word, Excel, PowerPoint files and images can be summarised and questioned alongside recordings.
For engines it ships Apple Speech and a downloadable Parakeet model for transcription, plus Apple Intelligence and a downloadable Qwen 3 model for the AI side. It publishes numbers for that choice.
In its own LibriSpeech benchmark — English only, read speech, run by the vendor rather than independently — it reports Apple’s SpeechAnalyzer at 2.12% word error rate on the 2,620-utterance test-clean split and 4.56% on the harder 2,939-utterance test-other split, against 3.74% and 7.95% for Whisper Small. Those figures do not transfer to spontaneous, noisy, multi-speaker audio in another language.
The cost of that breadth: OS 26 and 14 languages
Two constraints arrive with the feature list, and both are hard limits rather than preferences.
Apple’s lookup data returns a minimum OS version of 26.0, and the App Store compatibility panel repeats it across iOS, iPadOS, macOS and visionOS. If your Mac is not on macOS 26, the app is not an option this year.
Language coverage is narrower than the category norm too: the listing shows 14 languages (“English and 13 more”). Fine for meetings in one office, a problem for a mixed archive.
What does Weesper Transcribe do differently?
It does one job and asks for very little to do it. Weesper Transcribe takes audio and video files you already have and turns them into editable, searchable, exportable text — no recording, no live dictation, no system-audio capture.
Transcription runs on your Mac through whisper.cpp, using a quantised turbo model alongside a lighter base model, with Metal acceleration on Apple Silicon. There is no account to create and nothing is uploaded.
The scope it covers, from the product page:
- 57 transcription languages rather than 14, which decides whether a file in a mixed archive gets transcribed at all
- Nine export formats — TXT, Markdown, SRT, VTT, DOCX, PDF, HTML, CSV and JSON
- Batch processing so a folder runs as one job instead of file by file
- Keyword and semantic search across every transcript you have ever made
- Multi-hour files handled reliably, plus inline editing and clickable timestamps
- macOS 13 or later, universal, including Intel Macs with AVX2 support
What it does not do is the honest half of this comparison: no AI summaries, no action-item extraction, no speaker labels, no chat-with-your-library. Those are Lyonesse features.
If subtitles or a clean client document are the output you need, that gap costs you nothing. If you need minutes with owners and deadlines, it costs you the whole purchase.
Inscribe vs Weesper Transcribe: the 2026 comparison
Every row below comes from the two vendors’ own published pages and App Store listings.
| Weesper Transcribe | Lyonesse (formerly Inscribe) | |
|---|---|---|
| Primary job | Transcribe files you already have | Record, transcribe, summarise, ask questions |
| Platforms | Mac | iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Vision |
| Minimum OS | macOS 13 (universal, Intel with AVX2) | OS 26.0 on every platform |
| On-device | ✅ Nothing uploaded | ✅ Nothing uploaded |
| Engine | Whisper via whisper.cpp | Apple Speech or Parakeet |
| Transcription languages | 57 | 14 |
| AI summaries / action items | ❌ | ✅ |
| Speaker labels | ❌ | ✅ |
| System-audio capture | ❌ | ✅ (Mac) |
| Live dictation into other apps | ❌ (that is its sister app) | ❌ |
| Batch processing | ✅ | Not published |
| Export formats | 9 | PDF and text |
| Semantic search of history | ✅ | Full-text search |
| Subscription required | ❌ Never | Optional |
| Microphone permission needed | ❌ | ✅ |
The two ❌ marks in the “live dictation” row are worth reading twice: neither app types for you. Live dictation into any text field is the job of the sister app, Weesper Neon Flow — a different product with a different purpose.
How much does the Inscribe app cost in 2026?
Both apps are free to download, and both put the real decision behind an in-app purchase. The billing models are opposites.
Lyonesse costs $7.99 per month, $29.99 per year, or $59.99 one-time for unlimited lifetime access, as three separate in-app purchases through Apple. The vendor’s own site prints the same three figures, and no free-tier quota is published on either surface.
Weesper Transcribe is free to download and transcribes files up to 15 minutes at full model quality. A single one-time Pro upgrade — never a subscription — removes the length limit and unlocks batch processing, the nine export formats, inline editing and search. The App Store shows the current amount before you buy.
The structural difference is not the headline number, it is what happens in year three: a subscription keeps charging, a one-time unlock does not. We worked that arithmetic through in our two-year cost comparison of subscription and one-time-purchase transcription apps.
Which one should you choose?
Pick on output, not on feature count. The question is what you hand over when the work is done.
Choose Lyonesse (formerly Inscribe) if:
- You need summaries, action items or speaker-labelled minutes as the deliverable
- The recordings have not happened yet and you want them captured live
- You want the same app on iPhone, iPad and Mac
- Every device you use is already on OS 26
Choose Weesper Transcribe if:
- You have a backlog of files rather than upcoming meetings
- Subtitles, DOCX, PDF or Markdown are what you actually ship
- Your archive spans languages outside a 14-language list
- You want no subscription, and no microphone or screen-recording permission granted
- Your Mac is on macOS 13, 14 or 15, or it is an Intel machine
For an archive specifically, the deciding features are unglamorous: you can queue a whole folder of recordings as a single job and then find a passage months later by meaning rather than exact wording. Neither is a headline feature. Both are what you use every week.
Frequently asked questions
Is Inscribe still called Inscribe in 2026?
No, not the transcription app. Listing id6754086711, previously published as Inscribe — Offline Transcription, now appears as Lyonesse: AI Transcript & Chat. It kept the original bundle identifier com.get-inscribe.inscribe, and get-inscribe.com answers a 308 Permanent Redirect to lyonesse.app. A rename, not a replacement — nothing was discontinued.
Why are there two different Mac apps called Inscribe?
Because two unrelated developers picked the same name. A completely separate free macOS app called Inscribe lives at getinscribe.app: a direct download rather than an App Store listing, requiring macOS 15.0 or later, doing live dictation into the frontmost window via a customisable hotkey. It does not transcribe existing files at all.
How much does the Inscribe app cost now?
The renamed app is free to download and keeps a free tier. Unlimited use is sold as one of three in-app purchases through Apple — monthly, annual, or a one-time Unlimited unlock, at the figures listed above. No free-tier quota is published on either surface, so treat it as undefined until you install the app.
Does Lyonesse run on my Mac?
Only if it is on macOS 26 or later. Apple’s lookup data returns a minimum OS version of 26.0, and the compatibility panel repeats it for iOS, iPadOS, macOS and visionOS alike. Weesper Transcribe requires macOS 13 or later and ships as a universal binary, so it also covers Intel Macs with AVX2 support.
Does Weesper Transcribe generate AI summaries or action items?
No, and it does not claim to. It produces the transcript and everything that hangs off it: inline editing, clickable timestamps, nine export formats, batch processing, and keyword plus semantic search. Summarising and extracting action items are deliberately out of scope, so a structured set of minutes is not what this app hands you.
Which app asks for fewer macOS permissions?
The file transcriber, and the gap is structural rather than a policy choice. Capturing system audio from a call is a separate Apple permission grant, and so is microphone access for live recording. A drag-and-drop transcriber needs neither, because it only reads the file you hand it.
The short version
Inscribe as a transcription brand no longer exists: it is Lyonesse, it wants OS 26, and it has grown into an AI workspace with summaries, action items and a Q&A layer. If structured output is your deliverable, it is the better fit.
If your problem is a pile of recordings that need to become subtitles, documents and a searchable archive — in any of 57 languages, on a Mac you already own, without a monthly charge — the narrower tool wins on every axis that matters.
Working through files you already have? See how batch processing, exports and transcript search fit together on macOS, or get it from the Mac App Store — free to download, one-time Pro upgrade, no subscription. Setup questions are answered in the support documentation.