My boss found this slick meeting-notes app. It does what every team meeting tool does now — joins your calls, transcribes them, writes minutes, hands back action items. One click, done. He put it on the trial list and asked me to set it up for the whole team.
I set it up. Then I read the privacy policy, because that's the part of this job nobody else wants.
Turns out everything we said — every planning call, every client name, every figure — was going up to a cloud provider to be transcribed and summarized. Nothing malicious there; that's just how those tools work. You hand over the audio, their servers process it, and somewhere your data lives in a building you don't control.
We do work under confidentiality. Client data isn't mine to hand to a third party because management liked a nice UI. So I did what I always do when SaaS won't fly: I built the local version.
Local Meeting Notes is a Windows app that records your mic and your system audio — Teams, Zoom, Meet, or just the conference room you're sitting in. It transcribes on your own machine with faster-whisper, then a small local LLM loaded through LM Studio turns the transcript into structured minutes: Summary, Key Decisions, Action Items (with owners and dates where people actually said them), and Open Questions. Export to Markdown, plain text, or PDF.
The part that matters: nothing leaves the machine. No cloud account, no upload, no subscription. You're not renting a summarizer for twenty dollars a month; it's a one-time cost that runs forever on hardware you already own.
The requirements are humble. Windows 10 or 11, Python 3.10+, and LM Studio with any small model loaded. It runs on plain CPU; a GPU just makes transcription faster. System audio is captured via WASAPI loopback, the same technique most screen recorders use, so it gets whatever the meeting app sends to your speakers.
Is it going to replace every meeting tool out there? No. But for the meetings where you actually invite it — the sensitive ones, the ones that shouldn't exist in someone else's logs — it does what the cloud apps do, minus the part that makes you uneasy.
One honest caveat from someone who's run systems for a decade: recording meetings may be regulated where you work, and being local doesn't make it free. Get consent from the people in the room. Record the ones that genuinely need recording, tell everyone it's happening, and don't be weird about it.
If that tradeoff sounds right, it's at symshah.gumroad.com/l/xgoypx. Nine dollars, one-time, runs entirely offline.
