Introduction

Perchnote records your meetings, transcribes them on your Mac, and turns the raw transcript into clean notes you can actually use. Everything lives on your machine. The audio, the transcripts, the notes, all of it sits in a local database under your own user folder. Nothing leaves your Mac unless you explicitly send it somewhere, like asking a cloud AI model to enhance a note or sharing a summary to Slack.

A few things to know up front:

• It is macOS only, and it needs macOS 14 or newer. A handful of features (Apple Intelligence, Apple Speech transcription) need macOS 26 or later.
• Transcription runs locally using Whisper. You do not need an internet connection to record and transcribe.
• AI notes are optional, and you choose the provider. Run everything on-device, point at a local model, or use a cloud API key. Your call.

If you have used Granola, Otter, or a built-in meeting recorder before, Perchnote will feel familiar. The difference is that you own the data and you decide what, if anything, talks to the cloud.