Quietly transcribes your meetings on your Mac. Whisper and an LLM cleanup pass run on-device, so the audio never leaves the machine, and there is no cloud account and no subscription. That is local in the full sense, where “bot-free” tools still upload. Notes save as plain Markdown you own.
Quietly captures audio to a temp file, transcribes it in the same
process, and deletes it unless you keep it. Notes are plain
.md in a folder you pick.
Cloud notetakers upload the audio. For NDA calls, M&A, hiring debriefs, therapy intakes, and research interviews, a SaaS copy of that recording is a liability you have to defend.
“Bot-free” can still mean uploaded. Removing the visible bot doesn’t stop the upload. If the audio leaves your Mac for transcription, it sits on someone else’s servers.
Your IRB or compliance line rules it out. “Recordings will not leave the device” is a sentence on-device Whisper satisfies word for word, and a cloud tool can’t.
And it bills you monthly. You pay a per-seat subscription for transcripts you took yourself, in a format you can’t fully export. You rent your own meetings.
Whisper large-v3 transcribes on your Mac. No API key, no inference bill, 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 on your Mac.
Quietly captures audio to a temp file, transcribes it in the same process, and deletes it 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 with 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 and keep it. You get a year of free updates, and the version you own keeps working after that. No per-meeting fee, no AI credits, no renewing seat.
Where the meeting audio 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 our Otter alternative for Mac · vs Granola · AI note takers that don’t join your meetings.
A meeting tool can drop the bot, encrypt its database, and promise to delete things. The moment it uploads the recording for transcription, you are trusting someone else’s cloud with the conversation. Quietly transcribes where the audio already is: on your Mac. With nothing to upload, there is nothing to leak, subpoena, or explain in a security review, and you keep a Markdown file you can still open in ten years.
On-device Whisper + LLM cleanup, plain Markdown, no subscription. $49 once, macOS 13+.