Last year I was in a client call where someone casually said "just hit record" on whatever transcription app they used. My stomach dropped. We were discussing pricing structures under NDA, and that person's tool was piping audio to a cloud API.
I started looking for something better. Not another SaaS with a per-seat monthly fee — those add up fast and the data leaves your machine either way. I wanted everything local: recording, transcription, summarizing. Done on my own PC, nothing uploaded.
What I found was Local Meeting Notes, a Windows app that handles the whole pipeline without ever hitting the internet. Here's why it works for me and how to get started:
How it actually works. You hit record and it captures both your microphone and system audio — so if you're on Teams, Zoom, or Google Meet, everything goes into one stream. Then it runs Whisper locally (via faster-whisper) to transcribe the whole thing. After that, a local LLM reads through the transcript and pulls out structured minutes: a summary, key decisions made, action items with owners where stated, and open questions.
You get Markdown, text, or PDF exports. That's it.
Why locals-only matters. If you work in healthcare, legal, finance, or anywhere NDAs are real, sending meeting audio to a third-party service is either against policy or close enough to risky that you shouldn't bother. This runs entirely on your machine. No account required. No subscription. The transcript and the LLM both live where they should be — on your hardware.
Getting it running takes about 10 minutes. You need Windows 10 or 11, Python 3.10+, and LM Studio (free) with any small model loaded. That's the whole stack. CPU-only works fine; a GPU just speeds up transcription. The app uses WASAPI loopback for system audio capture — no virtual cable nonsense.
I know what you're thinking: another tool to install. But at $9 one-time, it costs less than two months of most competing services. And the math is simple when meetings are weekly — that subscription adds up to more than a year of this in three months.
There's also just something nice about not having to wonder where your data went after you hit stop recording. It stayed on your machine. Period.
If you're tired of monthly seats for meeting tools and want something that actually respects the privacy of what gets said in rooms (or Zoom calls), it's worth a look:
https://symshah.gumroad.com/l/xgoypx
Note: recording meetings is regulated in some jurisdictions. Get consent from participants before hitting record — this isn't legal advice, just honest practice.
