Your Mac becomes a confidential court reporter

What it does Steno is a macOS app that listens to your meetings, transcribes them with whisper.cpp, and summarizes the transcript using bundled Ollama models. Everything stays on your Mac—audio, text, and AI inference. It detects when a meeting starts and offers to take notes, captures system audio to record both sides of video calls, and tags speakers as [You] versus [Others].

The interesting bit The project treats privacy-first as a deployment architecture, not just a marketing checkbox. It bundles its own Ollama binary and ships five local LLMs for summarization, but also supports org-wide managed adapters that route AI traffic through an internal endpoint—no API keys, no cloud leakage. For the automation-inclined, it exposes stenoai:// deep links that pair with macOS Shortcuts and calendar apps.

Key highlights

• 100% on-device transcription and summarization via whisper.cpp and local Ollama models
• System audio capture with speaker diarization on macOS 14.4+
• Auto-detects meeting start/stop and offers to record (Granola-style)
• Natural-language Q&A across your entire meeting library
• Markdown output you can edit, search, or sync elsewhere
• Optional remote Ollama offload or BYO cloud model (OpenAI, Anthropic) for users who want it
• Organisation AI adapter for managed enterprise deployments

Caveats

• macOS 14 Sonoma or later only; Intel Macs are supported but explicitly noted as slow
• Windows version is on the roadmap but not available yet
• Live transcription during recording is planned but not implemented

Verdict Worth a look if you work in government, defense, legal, or any environment where “confidential” actually means confidential. Everyone else can probably keep using their cloud notetaker—though the auto-detect and local Q&A features might make you reconsider.