Pauta

Pauta is a meeting transcription and summarization app for Mac and Windows that runs entirely on your own computer. It records your microphone or your system audio, transcribes the conversation while it happens, and then turns it into a note with decisions and tasks. The product is aimed at people who hold a lot of conversations — meetings, interviews, classes, appointments and voice notes — and who want a private memory of them rather than another cloud subscription. There is no bot that joins the call, no account to create and no server storing your audio. You pay once and the license is yours forever. Most meeting recorders work the same way: a bot joins the call as an extra participant, audio is streamed to a server, and the transcript lives in someone else's cloud behind a monthly fee. Pauta takes the opposite route. It records through your own computer, capturing both the microphone and the system audio, so it works in Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams and any other call with no extra guest. The website is explicit that nothing leaves your machine: Pauta servers do not receive your recordings, transcripts or summaries. Offline use is supported — the internet is only needed to validate the license, download models and, if you connect Claude or ChatGPT, to summarize with them. Capture starts in two ways. Pauta notices when a meeting starts, or you turn it on manually whenever you want, for videos and any system audio. The rule stated on the site is simple: if you can hear it, Pauta can capture it. Controls are always at hand — on the Mac the recording sits at the top of the screen in the Mac Island; on Windows the system tray offers one click to record or mark a moment. During a session you can mark a moment worth returning to and turn on stealth recording from a meeting-detected prompt. Before you record, the options drawer shows what stays on the device. Transcription happens while the conversation is happening, from either the microphone or the system audio, and the text stays on your machine without touching a server. The interface shows the transcription engine in use — Parakeet V3 in the demo screens — alongside a language setting. Speaker identification is the second layer: Pauta separates the voices in each meeting and matches them against people it already knows, on your computer. It learns each person's voice and recognizes it in later meetings, so a familiar participant is labeled by name instead of a generic speaker number. Fix a name once and it remembers; the demo shows three speakers in a recording with two already named. Summaries are produced by the AI you pick. Local Qwen 2.5 3B is the default and the recommended option: it runs on your computer, with no cloud and no account. If you prefer, you can connect Claude or ChatGPT using your own API key, in which case the text for a summary or an answer goes to that provider. The output is a structured note rather than a wall of text — the screens show a note written by AI and attached to a project, with a decisions list covering items such as the second batch closing on Friday, Rafael taking the integration by Thursday and support being warned before the holiday, plus a task count. Projects give Pauta its memory. You create a project with a name and a description, and each recording lands in the right one; when a recording ends, Pauta suggests the right project and you confirm it with one click. A project then rolls every conversation on that subject into a single summary — the example project called Batch 2 holds three recordings totaling 1h54 and keeps an overview plus a shared decisions list. On top of that, each project has an AI conversation about all of its recordings. Inside a project you can ask what has been decided so far or who ended up with the most tasks, and the answer draws on the summaries and transcripts of every recording in that project. Beyond projects, Pauta organizes recordings with tags and a no-project bucket for anything you have not filed yet, and transcripts are searchable. Two integrations extend where the material goes. Obsidian Sync turns every recording into a note in your vault, organized by project, and keeps the note current when you edit it in Pauta. The calendar sits in the menu bar: your next meeting shows next to the icon, read from Apple Calendar with no server involved — to see Google or Outlook you connect those accounts to Calendar. The website sums the workflow up as detect, transcribe, know who spoke, summarize, organize into projects and answer across meetings. The overall approach is local-first and native. Pauta is built with SwiftUI for macOS on Apple Silicon and Intel as a universal binary, and for Windows 10 and 11 on x64 and ARM64 through the Microsoft Store. Because transcription and summaries run on the computer, the pipeline does not depend on a connection, and the privacy default is visible before you record. The only outbound contacts Pauta describes are license validation, model downloads, update checks and the optional Claude or ChatGPT calls you configure yourself. For users, the outcome is a durable, private record of conversations. Decisions and tasks are captured in a note instead of being reconstructed from memory; familiar voices are named automatically; and a subject's history is queryable in one place rather than scattered across separate recordings. Because the license is a one-time purchase, the cost does not scale with usage, and every future update is included. The site lists broad use cases rather than a single vertical. Pauta transcribes any audio from the computer or the microphone: online meetings, classes, interviews, appointments and videos. It also handles voice notes, which the product description groups with meetings and interviews as material it records, transcribes and turns into summaries and action items. The demo screens show day-to-day scenarios — a project meeting on a customer batch with three speakers, a coffee with the design team, a one-on-one with Rafael, and a roadmap review pulled from the calendar. Pauta is sold as a lifetime license: $5, marked down from $15, paid once with every future update included and no subscription or annual fees. Before buying, you can try it free for 7 days with no card required. A license activates on up to 2 computers — two Macs with the Mac license or two PCs with the Windows one — and you can deactivate an old computer to free a slot. The Mac version requires macOS 13 Ventura or later; the Windows version installs and updates through the Microsoft Store. After purchase the serial key arrives on the confirmation page and by email, payment is handled by Stripe, and activation happens in Pauta's license settings. iOS and Android builds are listed as work in progress with a waitlist. Taken together, Pauta positions itself as a private, pay-once replacement for bot-based meeting recorders: your microphone and system audio transcribed and summarized on your own Mac or Windows machine, speakers recognized by voice, and every conversation on a subject gathered into a project you can question.