Your next meeting doesn't have to be uploaded anywhere to get a decent summary. Google quietly released Google AI Edge Foresight, a free AI note-taking app that transcribes meetings and audio files entirely offline — no cloud, no account, no server bill, and nothing to sign up for. Emma Roth reported it for The Verge, and TechCrunch had it earlier.
What happened
Foresight is an experimental Google app that runs on macOS. It transcribes your meetings and audio files, writes them up for you, and gives you a space to take your own notes at the same time. It's free to use.
The AI doing the work is Google's on-device EmbeddingGemma 2 model. “On-device” means the model lives on your laptop instead of in a data center — think pocket calculator rather than supercomputer you have to phone. “Embedding” just means the model turns words into number patterns it can compare, which is how it can answer a question about something you said 20 minutes ago.
Here's the flow: Foresight listens, transcribes, and summarizes as the call happens. You type shorthand bullets — “pricing pushback,” “send the deck Friday” — and the app turns them into what Google calls “polished notes,” using the transcript to fill in the blanks. There's a built-in assistant you can ask things like “what did she say about the deadline?” And you can connect local files that the app will reference when it answers.
Google says your files, your meeting audio and your notes never leave your computer. That's the whole pitch.
Foresight sits in the same category as AI note-takers like Granola and Wispr Flow, but it stands out because it does everything on-device. One catch: it's currently only optimized for Macs with Apple Silicon.
What it means for you
The real story here isn't the tech — it's that “the AI never touches the internet” kills the excuse most people have for not recording their calls.
At home
You know the drill: you're on hold with your insurance company for 40 minutes, finally get answers, then forget half of them the second you hang up. Run that call through Foresight, or drop the recording in as an audio file, and you've got a written record you can search later. Same deal for a parent-teacher meeting, a doctor explaining a treatment, or a contractor telling you what's wrong with your boiler. No subscription, nothing uploaded.
At work
Back-to-back calls are where notes go to die. With Foresight running, you type five words per meeting instead of trying to type every sentence, and you walk out with a summary you can paste into Slack. The offline part matters more than you'd think: HR conversations, performance reviews, and anything under NDA stay on your machine.
For your business
If you take client calls, you already know the awkward part — recording them usually means shipping the audio to a third-party service and hoping their privacy policy holds up. Foresight keeps the audio local, so you can tell a nervous client exactly where their words live. That's an easier conversation, and sometimes it's the difference between getting the recording and not getting it.
For students
Lectures are the classic use case. Record the seminar, get a transcript, then ask the assistant “what were the three causes we covered?” instead of scrubbing through 90 minutes of video at 2x. You can connect your own files too — your reading notes, a study guide — and the assistant will answer with that context in mind.
If you want more free tools to stack next to this one, MyKreaTool keeps a running list worth browsing.
For creators
Interview-heavy work gets a lot easier. Podcasters and YouTubers can transcribe recordings offline on a plane, pull quotes, and draft show notes without paying a per-minute transcription fee or uploading an unpublished interview to somebody else's server before the episode is even out.
For extra income
Meeting notes as a service is a real freelance niche. A free, on-device app means your costs stay at zero while your turnaround time drops, and clients who care about confidentiality get a much better answer than “trust me, the transcription company is fine.” If you already do VA or admin work, this is a service you can bolt on this week.
How to try it right now
1. Know the price first: it's free. No credit card, no trial countdown, no per-minute fee.
2. Check your chip. Go to the Apple menu → About This Mac. You need an Apple Silicon Mac (M-series). If it says Intel, this one isn't optimized for you.
3. Find the app. Search for Google AI Edge Foresight. It's an experimental release rather than a big consumer launch, so look for it by name.
4. Open it and allow microphone access. On-device means that permission dialog is basically the whole setup.
5. Let it listen to one meeting. Type three to five bullets while people talk. Don't try to transcribe by hand — that's the app's job.
6. Test the assistant. When the call ends, ask it something specific about what was actually said.
7. Connect a local file. Point it at a document and ask a question that needs both the file and the meeting.
Upsides and what changes
Offline changes the math in three ways. First, privacy stops being a trade-off — you don't hand your audio to anyone to get a transcript. Second, cost: there's no per-minute meter running, so long recordings stop feeling expensive. Third, context: connecting your own local files means the assistant can answer with your documents in the mix, not just the transcript.
It also works where cloud apps don't. Flights, basements, spotty hotel Wi-Fi, buildings where you can't connect to outside services — all fair game. And it raises the bar for the whole category: every cloud note-taker now has to explain why your meeting audio needs to sit on their servers.
Limitations
Let's be honest about what you're getting. Foresight is experimental, and “experimental” is Google's own word — expect rough edges. It runs on macOS and is currently only optimized for Apple Silicon, so Windows users are out of luck for now. Everything stays on one machine, which is the point, but it also means no syncing your notes to your phone on the way home. And because the model runs on your laptop rather than a warehouse of GPUs, the output is only as good as what your microphone picks up — bad audio in, bad notes out. Clean speech, one speaker at a time, and a decent mic get you a much better result than a noisy room full of people talking over each other.
Conclusion
Google AI Edge Foresight is a free, offline AI note-taker for macOS that transcribes meetings on-device and turns your quick bullets into notes you can actually use. It won't replace your judgment, and it's early, but it does something nobody else in the meeting-notes space does quite the same way: it keeps the audio on your machine.
One action for today: if you're on an Apple Silicon Mac, install Google AI Edge Foresight and run it on your very next call. Type five bullets and see whether the polished notes are good enough to paste straight into Slack. If you're not on a Mac, keep an eye on it — and stop uploading meeting audio you don't need to upload.
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