wtf is localcaptions?

LocalCaptions is a Chrome extension that captures your Google Meet transcript in real time and keeps every bit of it on your own computer. It does not send audio or text to any server, requires no account or sign up, and does not add a bot to your meeting. Instead, it reads the captions that Google Meet already generates when you turn on CC, cleans them up, and organizes them into a proper speaker-by-speaker transcript that lives only inside your browser. While a meeting is running, a draggable, resizable panel appears over the Meet tab and fills with the transcript as people speak. You can select and copy any part of it, copy a single line, or copy the whole thing at once. Every meeting is saved automatically to a local database as it happens, using the browser's built in IndexedDB storage, so nothing is lost even if the tab crashes partway through. A separate history page lets you search across all your past meetings, view any of them again, and export a transcript as a plain text or Markdown file. One of the harder problems the extension solves is that Google Meet's live captions constantly rewrite themselves word by word as speech recognition catches up, which would normally produce a messy, repeating transcript. LocalCaptions tracks each spoken turn by a stable identifier and only commits the final, stabilized version of each line, merging fragments that Google re-renders under a new element mid-sentence without duplicating them or accidentally combining two separate turns into one. Since it is not published on the Chrome Web Store, installing it means downloading or cloning the source code, opening chrome://extensions, turning on Developer mode, and loading the project folder as an unpacked extension. It works the same way in other Chromium based browsers such as Edge, Brave, and Arc. The extension itself has no runtime dependencies and needs no build step, Node.js is only needed if you want to run its test suite of 28 cases. It is released under the MIT license.