Introducing Oaken Notes: Private Meeting Notes for macOS

There’s an open secret in modern meetings: the “bot in the room” is a privacy nightmare.

We’ve all seen it. You join a Zoom or Google Meet call, and five seconds later, a generic avatar called “Otter Assistant” or “Fireflies.ai” joins the lobby. The conversation shifts. You aren’t just talking to your colleagues anymore. You’re talking to a cloud-hosted bucket in a database you don’t control.

For years, we’ve been told this is the price of progress. Want AI transcription and automated summaries? Pay the “privacy tax.” Trust that a startup’s security is as robust as they claim. Accept that your most sensitive strategy, your candidate interviews, and your raw ideas are being processed on someone else’s hardware.

I built Oaken Notes because I’m tired of paying that tax.

The Thinking Gap

As a developer, I noticed a second problem. Most meeting recorders are purely reactive. They start when the call begins and stop when it ends. But that isn’t how we actually work.

Your best ideas rarely happen during the call. They happen in the five minutes after the call while you’re processing what was said. Or they happen at 10:00 PM when you finally connect two disparate threads from three different meetings.

When your meeting recorder is a silo, those ideas have nowhere to go. You end up with transcripts in one app and your actual thoughts in another. Usually Apple Notes, Obsidian, or a scattered collection of Markdown files.

Oaken Notes is a hybrid tool designed to close that gap.

What is Oaken Notes?

Oaken Notes is a private meeting recorder and thinking tool built exclusively for macOS. It does two things exceptionally well:

1. Private Transcription: It records and transcribes your meetings with zero data leaving your Mac.
2. Standalone Thinking: It provides a dedicated space for private, independent notes that you can capture anytime, not just when you’re on a call.

The “Hybrid” model means you can link a manual note to a specific calendar event or keep it entirely independent. Your independent thoughts and your recorded conversations live in the same private ecosystem, so you can connect the dots across your entire workday.

How it Works (and why it’s private)

The reason Oaken Notes didn’t exist two years ago is the hardware wasn’t ready. To build a truly private recorder, we had to move the AI from the cloud to your local CPU and GPU.

Oaken is built natively for macOS 26 (Tahoe) and Apple Silicon. Here’s how it handles your data:

• Transcription: We use WhisperKit for local Whisper inference. When you hit record, your Mac’s Neural Engine handles the transcription in real-time. Apple Intelligence serves as a secondary on-device transcription backend.
• Summarization: Your meeting summaries and action items are generated using Apple’s FoundationModels SystemLanguageModel. This is the same on-device LLM that powers the core macOS experience. Your transcripts never touch a third-party API.
• Audio Capture: We use AVAudioEngine for your microphone and ScreenCaptureKit for crisp system audio capture.
• Storage: Everything is stored in a local SQLite database on your machine. Your audio files are saved as standard .m4a files in a folder you control.

Because Oaken is a native Swift 6 and SwiftUI app, it feels like part of the OS. It follows the Liquid Glass design language of Tahoe and respects your system’s privacy settings at every turn.

Trust is the Product

We don’t just say we’re private. We design for it.

• Zero Analytics: There are no analytics SDKs in Oaken. No telemetry. No “checking in” with a home server.
• Privacy Pulse: A live indicator shows you exactly when Oaken is accessing your audio or processing data.
• No Accounts: You don’t need to sign up. There’s no password to remember because there’s no server to log into.
• No Bots: Oaken doesn’t “join” your calls. It captures audio locally from your system, so you never have to explain a weird bot in the lobby to a client again.

Integration, not Isolation

Oaken isn’t another silo. It integrates with your existing workflow. It sees your calendar, helps you prepare for upcoming meetings, and automatically links your notes to the right events.

When you’re ready to move your work elsewhere, Oaken Pro has export options to get your notes into your system of choice.

Pricing

Oaken Notes is available today as a direct download.

• Oaken Free: Unlimited local transcription and standalone notes. 25 AI enhancements (summaries/templates) per month.
• Oaken Pro: Unlimited AI enhancements, iCloud sync across your Macs, Agent Mode (coming soon) for deep research, custom templates, and advanced export options.

Get Started

If you’re ready to stop paying the privacy tax and start connecting your meetings to your actual thinking, download Oaken Notes at oakennotes.com.

It’s time to take your meetings off the cloud and put them back where they belong: on your Mac.