On-device notes

An on-device alternative to a cloud AI notetaker on Mac

Published July 12, 2026 by Stillnote

A lot of the newer AI notetakers earn their popularity by being pleasant to use: no bot to admit, a clean summary a moment after the call, notes you can search later. That experience is genuinely better than the old bot-in-the-meeting model. The open question for anyone handling sensitive conversations is a different one: once the meeting is captured, where does it actually get processed, and where does it live afterward? This guide explains the distinction between a cloud AI notetaker and an on-device one, and how to tell which kind you are actually using.

Two designs that look the same on the surface

From the user's seat, a cloud notetaker and an on-device one can feel almost identical: you start a meeting, you get a transcript and a summary. The difference is underneath. A cloud AI notetaker sends your captured audio or transcript to its servers to run the speech-to-text and the summary, and then keeps those notes in its own cloud so you can open them from a browser or another device. That is what makes the web and mobile experience possible, and it is also what puts your meeting on someone else's infrastructure, subject to their retention, their access controls, and their model-training choices.

An on-device notetaker does the same job in a different place. The transcription model and the summarization model run on your own machine, so there is nothing to upload and nothing to store remotely. You trade the browse-from-anywhere convenience for a simple guarantee: the conversation stays on the computer that recorded it.

What Stillnote does on your Mac

Stillnote keeps the entire pipeline local:

• Recording happens on your Mac and stays there.
• Transcription runs locally, so no audio is uploaded to a cloud service to be turned into text.
• The summary, decisions, and action items are generated by a model running on your Mac.
• Notes are stored on your device, not in a Stillnote cloud you have to trust.

Because nothing is uploaded, your meeting audio and transcripts never leave your device, never reach a Stillnote server, and are never used as training data. And because Stillnote listens through your Mac's own audio instead of joining the meeting, there is no bot participant, no join request, and no recorder to admit. That same design is why it works across Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Slack huddles, Webex, phone calls on speaker, and in-person conversations: if your Mac can hear it, Stillnote can take notes on it. Because you are the one recording, obtaining any consent your participants or jurisdiction require is still your responsibility.

Who wants an on-device notetaker specifically

The demand for a local option almost always comes from people whose meetings should not become a third party's stored data:

• Lawyers and advisors who cannot send privileged client conversations to an outside server.
• Healthcare and finance professionals handling confidential client and patient discussions.
• Investors and executives in confidential strategy, hiring, board, and portfolio calls.
• Anyone who simply does not want their conversations retained in a vendor's cloud or used to train a model.

How to tell which kind of notetaker you are using

"Private" and "secure" on a marketing page do not tell you where the processing happens. Before you trust an AI notetaker with a real meeting, check these five things:

• Where does the transcription and summary run, on your machine or on the vendor's servers?
• Where do the finished notes live afterward, on your device or in the vendor's cloud account?
• Does it join the call as a bot, or listen through your own computer's audio?
• Does the audio or transcript ever leave your machine, and does the vendor train models on it?
• Does it keep working with no internet connection? Only a tool that processes locally can.

Stillnote is designed to answer all five in favor of privacy: transcription and summarization run on your Mac, the notes stay on your device, no bot joins the call, your audio and transcripts never train a model, and it works offline. It is free for 5 enhanced notes a month with no credit card required. See the full pricing for the Plus and Pro plans.

You do not have to give up the automatic summary

Choosing an on-device tool does not mean going back to typing everything yourself. During the meeting you can jot rough notes as usual. About three seconds after you hang up, Stillnote produces a clean summary, the key decisions, and the action items, built on top of whatever you typed, so your own words are preserved. As with any AI tool, review the generated summary before relying on it. You can read more about how Stillnote works on the homepage.

On-device AI notetaker: common questions

Keep reading

Comparing Stillnote against a specific tool? These side-by-side pages cover the on-device, no-bot difference in detail.

This guide describes how Stillnote works and how to evaluate AI meeting notetakers at a category level. It does not assert specifics about any other tool's internal implementation, and product details can change. Stillnote is a native macOS app on Apple Silicon, made by LeapVision Technologies Inc.