Meeting notes that stay on your Mac

No bot

Nothing joins your call

Oatmeal listens the way you do: through your Mac. It records your microphone and the sound your Mac plays, so it works with any call app and nobody sees a notetaker in the participant list.¹

Recording starts only when you press Start, and the window always shows that it’s recording.

Two sources

Your voice and theirs, kept apart

Your microphone is labelled Me and everything your Mac plays is labelled System audio. Each has its own level meter, so you can see both are coming through before the meeting gets going.

If your microphone goes quiet for five seconds, Oatmeal tells you. If audio drops out, the gap shows in the recording instead of being quietly papered over.²

Summaries

Summaries that point back to what was said

Oatmeal reads the meeting five minutes at a time, then writes an overview, follow-ups and a timeline. Each part comes from the transcript, so you can check it against the moment it came from.

Pick a style for the meeting, General, Standup, 1:1 or Interview, and how much detail you want: Crisp, Balanced or Detailed. Add the names and terms your team uses so they come out spelled right. When a summary is useful, Add to notes puts it on your page.

Decisions and action items

Suggestions stay suggestions until you stamp them

Oatmeal can suggest the decisions and action items it heard. Each one arrives as a proposal in the margin, with the time it came from. Nothing becomes a decision or a to-do until you confirm it.

If nothing clear was decided, the list stays empty rather than inventing something.

Search

Find anything anyone said, in any meeting

Search every meeting at once by keyword, and filter by type and date. You can also turn on search by meaning, so “budget” finds the meeting where someone said “we’re over on spend”.³

Crash safety

A crash doesn’t take your meeting with it

Oatmeal saves as it records, so a crash, a restart or a dead battery doesn’t lose the meeting. Open Oatmeal again and choose to carry on recording the same meeting or to keep what was saved.

Long transcriptions can be stopped and resumed later without starting over.

Export

Take your notes anywhere, as Markdown

Export a meeting to a folder of your choice: your notes and transcript as a Markdown file that opens in any notes app, with the recordings too if you want them.

Already have a recording? Import an audio file and Oatmeal transcribes it the same way.

Privacy

Your meetings never leave your Mac

• Transcripts, summaries and search are all made on your Mac.
• No account, no cloud, and nothing about your meetings is ever sent anywhere.
• Recording, transcription and search work without an internet connection.
• Choose whether to keep recordings after they’re transcribed, and delete a recording or a whole meeting whenever you like.

Before you start

Bring your own models

Oatmeal works with transcription and summary models you add to your Mac. They aren’t included in the app, and there’s no download button inside it.

Settings lists the models it finds, marks the ones we’ve tested as Qualified and the rest as Experimental, and has a button that checks a model works before your next meeting.

Consent

Tell people you’re recording

Oatmeal records only when you press Start, but it can’t know whether everyone on the call has agreed. Letting people know, and following the rules where you and they are, is up to you.