{"slug": "show-hn-100-free-private-meeting-notes-that-never-leave-your-mac", "title": "Show HN: 100% Free, private meeting notes that never leave your Mac", "summary": "Oats, a free meeting-notes app for Mac, processes all audio and transcription locally using Whisper and Ollama, ensuring no data ever leaves the user's machine. The app, which supports optional cloud AI keys for Claude, Gemini, or OpenAI, costs nothing because it runs entirely on-device, unlike competitors charging $10–20 per month.", "body_md": "You take the meeting. Oats quietly turns your notes into clean write-ups — right on your Mac, where nothing you say ever leaves.\n\nWindows shows a “protected your PC” notice on first launch. Click **More info**, then **Run anyway**. It only means the app isn't code-signed yet, not that it's unsafe.\n\nOats hears the call through your Mac and works out who is speaking. Nothing ever joins the meeting.\n\nNote what matters to you. When the call ends, Oats blends it with the transcript into a clean write-up.\n\nThe write-up is yours to export as a real file. It lives on your Mac, never in our cloud.\n\nWhisper and Ollama run locally, out of the box. Prefer Claude, Gemini or OpenAI? Bring your own key.\n\nLocal by design, so the guarantee is the architecture, not a policy you have to trust.\n\nNothing shows up in the attendee list. Nobody has to consent to a robot they never invited.\n\nRecordings, transcripts and notes all stay local. Wipe every trace in one click.\n\nNot a promise. A fact. Your words never reach a server that could.\n\nExport a file anyone can open. No login wall, no lock-in.\n\nPrivileged. Clinical. Under NDA. If uploading a client's words isn't an option, local-first is the only kind of notetaker that works.\n\nEveryone else charges **$10–20 a month** to run this in their cloud. Oats runs on your machine, so it costs us nothing, and nothing to you.\n\nBe in the room, not behind a keyboard. Oats keeps the record.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-100-free-private-meeting-notes-that-never-leave-your-mac", "canonical_source": "https://oatsnote.com/", "published_at": "2026-07-24 07:33:58+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-24 07:52:30.809620+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-tools", "natural-language-processing"], "entities": ["Oats", "Whisper", "Ollama", "Claude", "Gemini", "OpenAI"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-100-free-private-meeting-notes-that-never-leave-your-mac", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-100-free-private-meeting-notes-that-never-leave-your-mac.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-100-free-private-meeting-notes-that-never-leave-your-mac.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-100-free-private-meeting-notes-that-never-leave-your-mac.jsonld"}}