Oats

Oats is a free, open-source meeting notetaker from Ariso for Mac and Windows that records with no bot on the call and can transcribe and summarize fully on-device. It produces clean Markdown summaries, transcripts, and speaker labels, stored locally on your machine.

Oats is a free, open-source meeting notetaker built by Ariso for macOS, with a Windows build in beta. Its defining choice is that no bot ever joins your call: Oats records whatever audio your computer can hear, from Zoom, Meet, Teams, a phone call, or an in-person conversation, directly on device. Recording and AI note generation can run entirely locally with a local model, so audio, transcripts, and notes never leave the machine, or you can connect an Ariso account to use the cloud backend for richer features. After a meeting, Oats hands you a clean Markdown summary and full transcript, with speaker labels sorting out who said what. On the local backend, recordings, transcripts, and notes are stored as plain Markdown files on your own machine, avoiding lock-in. A built-in library keeps every recording, transcript, and note in one place, and the Ariso cloud backend adds real-time transcription and web sharing. Ariso states it never uses meeting data to train models, including on the free plan. Technically, Oats is a Tauri v2 desktop app with a Vite and Vue 3 frontend and a Rust backend, and every line is public on GitHub so it can be audited, forked, or self-hosted. It is a strong pick for privacy-conscious individuals and teams who want local, no-bot meeting notes without a subscription, and less suited to those who specifically want a cloud bot that joins calls or a mature, first-class Windows and mobile experience today.