Free offline meeting transcription, with no cloud and no account
AuraScribe’s Notetaker records the call audio you hear plus your microphone and writes a timestamped transcript on your own Windows PC. Free, open source, and fully local, with no bot joining the call.
Most meeting transcription tools are paid, cloud-based, or both. You invite a bot into the call, it uploads the audio to a server, and the transcript lives in someone else’s account. AuraScribe’s Notetaker takes the opposite approach: it records the call on your own machine and writes the transcript there too. It is free, open source, and never sends your audio anywhere.
What “offline meeting transcription” actually means here
When you start the Notetaker, AuraScribe captures two things at once: the system audio you hear (the other people on the call) and your own microphone. It transcribes both on-device and writes a timestamped transcript to a local database on your PC. No bot joins the meeting, no recording is uploaded, and no account is involved. The only network request AuraScribe ever makes is the one-time download of the speech model, after which transcription runs fully offline.
It separates who is speaking
A wall of text is hard to use later. The Notetaker tells your voice apart from the guests and labels each speaker, starting with Speaker 1, Speaker 2, and so on. As the conversation goes on, if someone clearly introduces themselves or is addressed by name, AuraScribe fills that real name in. It only does this when it is confident, so you get honest labels rather than guessed names. There is also an optional word-by-word live transcript if you want to watch the text appear as people talk.
Where the transcript lives
Everything stays on your machine. Past meetings are listed in the app, grouped by date, and you can reopen any of them as a full page, keep recording a session you paused, or generate a local summary of the key points. Because the transcript is just data on your own disk, you decide what happens to it. Nothing is retained on a server because nothing was ever sent to one.
One honest limit
The Notetaker is a Windows feature today. Dictation (press a hotkey, speak, get text in any app) runs on Windows, macOS on Apple Silicon, and Linux, but meeting transcription is Windows only for now. We would rather say that plainly than imply coverage that is not there yet.
The short version
If you want to transcribe meetings without a subscription and without your call audio leaving your computer, AuraScribe is the free, local, open-source option. See how it compares with the paid cloud tools on the home page, or download it and record your next call locally. It pairs well with a free, open-source notetaker workflow.