Oats

Oats is a free, open-source meeting notetaker that records your meetings directly on your Mac — and on Windows in beta — without a bot joining the call and without sending your audio to a third-party cloud. When a meeting is over, Oats gives you a clean summary and a todo list you can actually work through, pulling out every action item along with who owns it, all from what was actually said. It is built for people who treat notes as the place a meeting's work starts rather than where it ends, and who want their recordings and AI processing to stay on their own machine. Oats is distributed as a desktop app, published openly on GitHub, and is free forever. Most note-takers want your recordings in their cloud. Many of them also join your calls as a visible bot, which can be awkward in external meetings and often needs host approval. Others put a paywall in the way — a seat count, a trial timer, or a limit that shows up around meeting number six. Oats was designed to not get in the way of your meetings: no bots, and no subscription needed when it runs locally with an on-device LLM. The product's stated principle is simple: your meetings stay on your machine. Oats records locally, runs AI locally, and never forces your audio off-device, while still offering richer cloud-backed features for people who want them. On-device recording is the foundation. Oats records directly from your Mac's audio — there is no browser extension, no bot, and no third-party server that ever touches the audio stream. It also works everywhere, because it captures any audio your Mac can hear: Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, a phone call, or even a hallway chat. That means the tool does not depend on which conferencing platform a meeting happens in, and it does not require the meeting host to admit a recording bot before the conversation can be captured. After each meeting, Oats produces AI-written notes. These include a quick digest, a full summary, action items broken out per person, and a quality score derived from the conversation itself. In the app's own example, a weekly sync with three attendees and a #standup tag produces a quick digest noting the roadmap was at risk of slipping, that the team aligned on an August 12 ship date, and that Q3 pricing was locked — followed by two action items, one owned by Sarah (own the API rework, unblock by Friday) and one owned by Max (confirm the August 12 ship date with the PM), plus a meeting quality score. The result is a summary you can read in seconds and a task list that already names the owner. Action items are not left buried in a document. They collect in a Todos tab, and when you tick one off in the notes it closes, so follow-ups actually get followed up on. On the local backend, notes are plain Markdown and action items are stored as Obsidian Tasks inside a vault you choose — you can open the vault in Obsidian, sync it, or move it anywhere. Oats also lets you download a meeting's recording and export its notes wherever you want them in one click, and every meeting you record lands in a searchable library where you can ask questions across your whole history, such as what you decided about pricing. Oats works in three steps: hit record, get notes instantly, follow through. You start Oats and begin your meeting; it listens on your Mac with no bot and no third-party cloud, and nothing joins the call. When the meeting ends, Oats writes a structured summary and pulls out every action item with its owner. Those action items then land in your Todos, and ticking one off in the notes or in Obsidian closes it. You can run everything on-device with a local model and keep audio fully private, or connect your Ariso account for richer AI features — the Ariso.ai cloud backend adds enhanced transcription, multi-language support, speaker recognition, assessment, coaching, and auto-tracking of follow-ups. Speaker tagging matches each voice in a recording to the person who said it, so notes say who rather than "Speaker 2" (currently available on the ariso.ai backend), and you can sign in with Microsoft using your work account alongside Google from onboarding, Settings, or the menu bar. The benefits follow from that design. Because recording and AI notes can run entirely on your Mac with a local model, zero data leaves your device when you choose the local path. Because the software is free forever — no seats, no trial timer, no paywall waiting at meeting six — there is no cost barrier to capturing every meeting. Because it is fully open source on GitHub, you can audit every line, fork it, self-host it, or ship your own features on top. And because local notes are plain Markdown in an Obsidian vault, there is no lock-in: you can export anything, owe nothing, and leave whenever you want. In practice, Oats fits recurring team rituals and ad-hoc conversations alike. A weekly sync or standup becomes a digest, a decision log, and a per-person task list without anyone taking minutes. Calls that happen across Zoom, Meet, or Teams are captured the same way, since Oats listens to system audio rather than integrating with one platform. A phone call or an in-person hallway chat your Mac can hear can be turned into notes too. Afterwards, action items flow into a Todos list or into an Obsidian vault, and the searchable library lets you look back across your entire meeting history to answer questions like what was decided about pricing. Oats is aimed at individuals and teams who hold meetings on a Mac and want notes without a bot in the room, including people who care about keeping audio on-device and users who prefer open-source, self-hostable software. It also suits Obsidian users, since local notes are plain Markdown with Obsidian Tasks and can live in a vault of their choosing. Related integrations mentioned in the content include Google and Microsoft sign-in and the optional Ariso.ai cloud backend. Oats ships as a desktop download for macOS and Windows (beta), and pricing is free — free forever, with no seats or trial timer. Oats is a free, open-source, on-device meeting notetaker whose core promise is that your meetings stay on your machine. It records without a bot, writes summaries and owner-tagged action items from what was actually said, pushes follow-ups into Todos or an Obsidian vault, and lets you add cloud AI only if you want it.