Oats

Oats is a free, open-source meeting notetaker that records your meetings right on your Mac. Instead of sending a bot into the call, Oats listens to audio your Mac can already hear, and when the meeting ends it hands you a clean summary and a todo list you can actually work through. The product is designed to not get in the way of your meetings, and its stated premise is that notes are where a meeting's work starts, not where it ends. It is aimed at people who spend their days in calls and want those calls turned into structured, actionable notes without involving a third-party cloud. Most meeting note-takers follow the same model: a bot joins the call, or a browser extension captures the audio, and the recordings are stored in the vendor's cloud behind a subscription. Oats positions itself as the open alternative to that approach. The website states that most note-takers want your recordings in their cloud, while Oats records locally, runs AI locally, and never forces your audio off-device. It also removes the usual commercial friction — no seats, no trial timer, and no paywall waiting at meeting six — and it keeps bots out of the call entirely. That combination of privacy, price, and unobtrusiveness is the problem the product was built to solve, and it is what the tagline describes as an open, free, on-device meeting notetaker. The core capability is on-device recording. Oats records directly from your Mac's audio, which means there is no browser extension, no bot, and no third-party server touching the audio stream. Because it works with any audio the machine can hear, Oats is not limited to one conferencing platform: the site lists Zoom, Meet, Teams, a phone call, and even a hallway chat as situations where Oats can turn sound into notes. The workflow is deliberately simple — hit record when the meeting starts, let Oats listen, and get notes instantly when the meeting ends. This matters because it means the user does not have to change tools, invite a participant, or change how the meeting is run in order to capture it. After each meeting Oats writes the notes for you. It produces a quick digest, a full summary, action items per person, and a quality score derived from the conversation itself. The example shown on the site is a weekly sync where the quick digest reads that the roadmap is at risk of slipping and that the team aligned on a ship date and locked pricing, while the action items are listed per owner. The quality score, shown as a "Productive" rating alongside the meeting length, gives a signal about how the conversation went. Because the notes are generated from what was actually said, they reflect the conversation rather than someone's memory of it, and the per-person action items make ownership explicit instead of leaving follow-ups buried in a document. Oats does not stop at producing text. Action items from every meeting collect in a Todos tab, and ticking one off in the notes closes it, so follow-ups actually get followed up. On the local backend, notes are stored as plain Markdown and action items as Obsidian Tasks inside a vault you choose — you can open that vault in Obsidian, sync it, or move it anywhere. Recent releases added one-click download and export, so a meeting's recording and its notes can be saved wherever you want them. Version 0.23 also added sign in with Microsoft, so a work Microsoft account can be used alongside Google from onboarding, Settings, or the menu bar. The product ships every week, with the full changelog published on GitHub. Oats can run entirely on your machine or with extra cloud capability. With a local model, recording and AI notes run on-device and zero data leaves your Mac, which keeps audio fully private. Connecting an Ariso account unlocks richer AI features, including enhanced transcription, multi-language support, speaker recognition, assessment, and coaching, plus auto-tracking of follow-ups. Speaker tagging is one of those cloud-side features: it matches each voice in a recording to the person who said it, so notes attribute statements to a name rather than "Speaker 2." The distinction is presented as a choice — keep everything local and private, or opt into the cloud backend when you want more from the AI. Oats is truly open source. Every line is public on GitHub, and the project invites users to read it, fork it, self-host it, or ship their own features on top. The site frames this as "open by design" and "inspect every line," the point being that you can audit what the software does rather than trusting a marketing page. Combined with local Markdown notes, this also removes lock-in: export anything, owe nothing, and leave whenever you want. Free forever, with no seats, no trial timer, and no paywall, is the other half of the same promise, and it is reinforced by the fact that running locally requires no subscription at all. The outcomes Oats promises follow directly from those design choices. Because recording happens on the machine, users get privacy without extra work — no bot appears in the participant list and no audio goes to a third-party server. Because action items are extracted per person and collected in a Todos tab, what was agreed in a meeting is more likely to be done, and items can be closed from the notes or from Obsidian. Because notes are searchable, a user can ask questions across their whole history — the example given is asking what was decided about pricing. And because the app is free and open source, there is no cost barrier to trying it or to keeping it. Concrete scenarios appear throughout the site. A weekly sync is shown in detail, with a quick digest noting a slipping roadmap, a locked pricing decision, and action items owned by named teammates. Standups are represented by the #standup tag on that meeting. Beyond scheduled calls, Oats handles any audio the Mac can hear: Zoom, Meet and Teams meetings, a phone call, or a hallway chat. The searchable library turns past meetings into a knowledge base you can question, and the Obsidian integration fits meeting notes into an existing note-taking and task workflow rather than creating a separate silo. Oats ships as a desktop application: a download for macOS and a Windows beta, with the code available on GitHub. Pricing is free — the app is free forever, and the site notes that no subscription is needed when running locally with an on-device LLM. Accounts are optional and only relevant if you want the Ariso cloud backend; sign-in supports Google and Microsoft, the latter added in v0.23 for work accounts. The integration surface is deliberately flat: local Markdown files, Obsidian vaults and Obsidian Tasks, and one-click export and download. The product is published by Ariso and developed in public. Taken together, Oats is a meeting notetaker built around a simple reversal: instead of pulling your meetings into a vendor's cloud, it keeps the recording and, if you choose, the AI on your own machine. Free, open source, no bot in the call, notes in plain Markdown you own, and a todo list that closes when you tick it off. For Mac users who want their meetings summarized and their follow-ups tracked without a subscription or a third party listening in, that is the whole value proposition — and it is available today, recording on your Mac in a minute.