Which AI scribes process audio on-device?

Very few. Hyprnote, Meetily, MacWhisper and Memory Notch transcribe on the machine. Otter, Fireflies, Fathom and the clinical scribes process in the cloud. Granola captures audio locally but passes it to a cloud transcription provider while the meeting runs, then deletes the audio afterwards.

Is a bot-free AI notetaker the same as a private one?

No. Bot-free means no extra participant appears in the call. It says nothing about where the audio is sent. A bot-free tool can still stream every word to a server. The question to ask is where the transcription runs, not who is in the participant list.

COMPARED

Where your audio actually goes

Every scribe here is good at something. They differ on one thing that no settings page can undo: whether the recording leaves your machine. That is what this table sorts by. Prices and details checked September 2026, with each vendor's own page linked on its comparison.

Tool	Where the audio goes	Processing	Bot in the call	Open source
Memory Notch	Nowhere	On-device, on the Neural Engine	No	No
Otter.ai	To Otter's servers	Cloud	Yes, a participant joins the meeting	No
Fireflies.ai	To Fireflies' servers	Cloud	Yes, a participant joins the meeting	No
Granola	To a cloud transcription provider, then deleted	Cloud, with local capture	No	No
Fathom	To Fathom's servers	Cloud	Yes, a participant joins the meeting	No
Abridge, Nuance DAX and the clinical scribes	To the vendor's HIPAA-covered cloud	Cloud	No, it listens in the room	No
Hyprnote	Nowhere	On-device	No	Yes
Meetily	Nowhere	On-device	No	Yes
MacWhisper	Nowhere	On-device	No	No

Bot-free is not the same as private

The marketing around notetakers has settled on "no bot in your meeting" as the privacy feature. It is a real improvement to the room: nobody sees a robot join, and people talk normally. It is not a statement about your data.

Granola is the clearest case, and to its credit the company documents it plainly. The app captures microphone and system audio on your Mac with no bot at all, then passes that audio to a cloud transcription provider while the meeting is happening. The audio is deleted once the transcript exists; the transcript and notes are kept on AWS in the United States. That is a thoughtful design. It is still a design in which your conversation is transmitted.

The distinction worth holding on to: who is in the room and where the words are processed are two different questions, and only the second one survives a subpoena, a breach or a change of ownership.

When a cloud scribe is the right answer

Often. If you need a shared team archive, CRM sync, conversation analytics across dozens of reps, or a clinical note written into an EHR with a signed BAA behind it, the cloud tools do things an on-device app on one laptop cannot. Fireflies and Otter are built for teams. Abridge and Nuance DAX are built for health systems and are genuinely good at clinical language. Fathom has the most generous free tier of the group.

On-device is the right answer when the conversation is the sensitive thing and you are the only one who needs the notes.

Where your audio actually goes

Bot-free is not the same as private

When a cloud scribe is the right answer

The comparisons