Quietly transcribes your meetings on your Mac — Whisper and an LLM cleanup pass run on-device, so the audio never leaves the machine, there’s no cloud account, and no subscription. Truly local, not just “bot-free.” Notes save as plain Markdown you own.
Audio captured to a temp file, transcribed in the same process,
deleted unless you keep it. Notes are plain .md in a
folder you pick.
Cloud notetakers upload the audio. NDA calls, M&A, hiring debriefs, therapy intakes, research interviews — a SaaS copy of that recording is a liability you have to defend.
“Bot-free” still isn’t local. Removing the visible bot doesn’t stop the upload. If the audio leaves your Mac to be transcribed, it’s on someone else’s servers.
Your IRB / compliance line says otherwise. “Recordings will not leave the device” is a sentence on-device Whisper satisfies literally — and a cloud tool can’t.
And it bills you monthly. A per-seat subscription for transcripts you took yourself, in a format you can’t fully export. You rent your own meetings, forever.
Whisper large-v3 transcribes locally — no API key, no inference billed against you, no audio sent anywhere.
An on-device LLM removes fillers and false starts and fixes punctuation, so the note reads as clean as a cloud service’s — computed entirely on your Mac.
Captured to a temp file, transcribed in the same process, deleted unless you keep it. No upload, no SaaS copy, no audit trail to defend.
Notes save to a folder you pick — Desktop, iCloud, your repo. Plain .md, no proprietary database, readable by any editor or AI tool.
Transcription, notes, and Apple Calendar all work with no connection. Only model downloads and optional Google Calendar polling ever touch the network.
Pay once, keep it forever. A year of free updates, then the version you own is yours. No per-meeting fee, no AI credits, no renewing seat.
Where the meeting audio actually goes — and what you pay for it.
| Quietly | Otter | Granola | Meetily | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Audio transcribed on-device (never uploaded) | Cloud | Cloud | Local | |
| No bot joins the call | Yes | Yes | ||
| Zero setup (no Ollama / Docker / build) | Yes | Yes | Self-host | |
| Notes as plain Markdown you own | Cloud DB | Export | ||
| No subscription | $49 once | $17/mo | $14+/mo | Free / $10·mo Pro |
Full breakdown in our guide to the best local meeting note takers for Mac, or see Quietly vs Otter · vs Granola.
That’s the whole test. A meeting tool can drop the bot, encrypt its database, and promise it deletes things — but the moment the recording is uploaded to be transcribed, you’re trusting someone else’s cloud with the conversation. Quietly does the transcription where the audio already is: on your Mac. Nothing to upload means nothing to leak, subpoena, or explain in a security review — and a Markdown file you’ll still be able to open in ten years.
On-device Whisper + LLM cleanup, plain Markdown, no subscription. $49 once, macOS 13+.