Free, open-source AI meeting notes for Mac

Search for an "AI meeting notes" app and you'll find a dozen that call themselves free. Open the pricing page and the free plan is usually a trial in disguise: a cap on how many meetings you can keep, a bot that stamps the vendor's name on every call, and your recordings sitting on someone else's servers whether you like it or not.

I wanted something genuinely free and genuinely mine, so I built Humla. It's a Mac app that takes meeting notes with AI — and it's free and open source, in the way those words are supposed to mean.

What "free" actually means here

Free forever, not free-until-you-hit-a-limit. There's no per-seat price, no meeting cap, no credit card, and no account required to use it on your own Mac. Download it and it works.

For comparison, the popular options gate the useful part behind a subscription:

• Granola's free tier caps your history and then it's $14/user/month.
• Otter's free plan allows three file imports, ever, then it's ~$17–20/user/month.
• Notion's meeting notes are bundled into a $20/member/month plan — you can't buy just the notes.

Humla's optional paid piece is team sync, and even that is $5/user/month — a third of Granola's entry price — or you can self-host it for nothing. The app itself never costs anything.

What "open source" actually means here

The whole app is MIT licensed and public on GitHub. That's not a marketing badge. For a meeting-notes app it's the only honest way to back up a privacy claim: instead of trusting a sentence on a landing page that says "we don't look at your data," you (or someone you trust) can read the code and see exactly what happens to your audio.

That matters more here than for most software, because meetings are where the sensitive stuff gets said — client details, salaries, half-formed ideas, things under NDA. "Trust us" is a lot to ask. "Here's the source" is better.

What it does

You take rough notes during the meeting like you normally would. In the background, Humla records your microphone and the call's audio through macOS itself, transcribes it, labels who said what, and writes a summary that combines your notes with what was actually said.

Two things make it different from the usual notetaker:

• No bot joins the call. It records your own Mac, so nothing shows up in the participant list and the other side sees nothing. More on that in no bot in the call.
• It can run entirely on your device. Transcription uses Whisper on Apple Silicon, and it can summarize locally too, so a confidential conversation never has to leave your machine. More on that in local & on-device.

If you'd rather use a cloud model for speed or accuracy, you can plug in your own OpenAI, Deepgram, or Groq key — it's your account and your bill, with no middleman.

Where it fits (and where it doesn't)

I'd rather be straight about this than oversell. Humla is the right tool if you want a free, private, open notetaker that lives on your Mac. It's not the right tool if you need a polished mobile app or deep CRM/Slack integrations today — the funded cloud products lead there, and I say so on the comparison pages. It's macOS 13+ only for now.

If your main objection to the incumbents is price, lock-in, or where your recordings end up, that's exactly the gap this fills.

Try it

Download Humla for macOS — no sign-up, free forever, open source. If you want to see the on-device transcription without installing anything, there's a demo on the local page that runs the model in your browser and never uploads your audio.

And if you work in a language other than English, that's a first-class case here, not an afterthought — Humla handles around 100 languages and can route each one to a different engine, including a local Norwegian model. I'll write more about multilingual meeting notes soon.