Troubleshoot Soufflé on Mac

Start with the symptom and check the permission, model or provider it depends on. Most recording and insertion problems can be narrowed down without deleting your data.

Updated

Start here

  1. Open Settings → System → Permissions and check Microphone, System Audio and Accessibility as needed. Use the repair option if an Accessibility entry became stale after an update.
  2. Check the selected microphone, speech model and AI provider. Missing system audio, a mixed transcript and an unavailable summary each have different requirements.
  3. If the problem remains, collect recent logs and describe your macOS version, Mac model and audio devices in a GitHub issue. Keep a backup before removing application data.

Troubleshooting

Symptom first, then the usual cause.

The other participants are missing from the transcriptSystem-audio capture needs macOS 14.4 or later and the System Audio permission. When it is unavailable the transcript is labelled Mic only and records your microphone alone.
A single-key push-to-talk shortcut does nothingLone modifiers and F5–F12 need the Accessibility permission for the native tap. Settings → System → Permissions links there.
The dictated text is not insertedAuto-paste may be off, in which case the text is waiting on the clipboard. Otherwise it is the Accessibility permission. If Soufflé is already listed and ticked there, the entry can be a stale one left by an update: remove it with the minus button and add it back, or use Repair in Settings → System → Permissions.
One app refuses the pasteTerminals and secure fields often reject a synthetic ⌘V. Switch the insertion method to simulated typing in Settings → Interface.
The wrong microphone is pickedPin an input, and a separate one for clamshell mode, in Settings → Audio. Bluetooth headsets are left out of automatic selection by default: using one as a microphone switches it to HFP and costs you stereo sound.
Polish or summaries do nothingBoth need a provider. Without Apple Intelligence (macOS 26+), install Ollama and pick a model in Settings → AI. The reason a pass was skipped is shown in the status message and written to the log.
A model download stopped part waySelect the model again to restart the download. Deleting its folder under models/ forces a clean re-download.
Anything elseSettings → System → Data reveals the data folder. logs/ holds the recent logs, which are what an issue needs.

Uninstall

Installed with Homebrew:

brew uninstall --cask souffle

Otherwise, drag Soufflé out of Applications.

Either way your data stays. To remove it too, quit Soufflé and delete ~/Library/Application Support/com.souffle.desktop/: meetings, dictations, recorded audio and models all live there.

To reclaim disk without uninstalling, select a speech model you no longer use and delete it under Settings → System → Model storage. It has to be downloaded and not loaded.

Build from source

The app is Rust with a native Slint interface, plus a little Swift for the overlay. Building it requires an Apple Silicon Mac, Rust, the Xcode command-line tools, and cmake (brew install cmake).

git clone https://github.com/damione1/souffle.git
cd souffle
make nightly

make nightly builds and opens Soufflé Nightly, a debug build with its own identity that sits next to an installed Soufflé. ./scripts/bundle-macos.sh builds a signed release bundle.

Reporting a problem

If something does not work the way this documentation describes, open an issue. Include your macOS version, your Mac model, the audio devices involved, and a log from the logs/ folder.

License

Copyright © 2026 Damien Goehrig. Released under the GNU General Public License v3.0 or later. You are free to use, study, modify and redistribute it, provided derivative works are published under the same license.