Meeting notes, where you already work
Serial Notes lives in your menu bar, records every meeting, and transcribes it on-device. Clean Markdown saves straight to the folder you choose — and sends itself to Notion or Apple Notes.
Free & open source · No account, no cloud
# Weekly Standup
June 1, 2026 · 6 participants
## Summary
Team aligned on the Q3 launch. The auth migration is the last blocker; design sign-off lands Thursday.
## Action items
- [ ] Dylan — ship the auth migration PR
- [ ] Priya — finalize onboarding copy
- [x] Sam — book the launch review
## Transcript
You 09:02 Let's start with the launch blockers.
Priya 09:04 Onboarding copy is about ninety percent there.
Fully compatible with
How it works
From call to clean notes,
all on device
Serial Notes runs entirely from your menu bar and handles the whole loop — watch it work, start to finish.
Meeting detected
Zoom
Standup notes
- •Ask Priya for the new onboarding copy
- •Design sign-off lands Thursday
- •move the launch review earlier?
Auth migration is the last blocker
Team aligned on the Q3 launch. The auth migration is the last blocker; design sign-off lands Thursday.
- Dylan — ship the auth migration PR
- Priya — finalize onboarding copy
- Sam — book the launch review
# Weekly Standup
June 1, 2026 · 6 participants
## Notes
- Ask Priya for the new onboarding copy
## Summary
Team aligned on the Q3 launch. Auth migration is the last blocker.
## Action items
- [ ] Dylan — ship the auth migration PR
## Transcript
You 09:02 Let's start with the blockers.
Captures every meeting. The moment a Zoom, Teams, or FaceTime call starts, a notification offers one-click recording, and it stops itself when the call ends. Google Meet, a phone call, anything your Mac can hear: one click from the menu bar records it.
Take notes as you talk. A built-in notepad floats above the call, even over full-screen Zoom, and styles your Markdown live as you type. When the meeting wraps, your notes land in the same file, right beside the transcript.
Summaries & action items. Everything is transcribed on your Mac with automatic speaker labels, then Apple Intelligence drafts a tight summary and a checklist of to-dos. Nothing ever leaves your machine.
Exports clean Markdown. Every meeting saves itself as one tidy .md file in the folder you choose. Open it in Notion, Obsidian, or Apple Notes, anywhere plain text goes.
Private by design
Your audio never leaves your Mac
Recording, transcription, and summaries all run on-device — nothing is ever uploaded. Each meeting saves as a plain Markdown file you own outright: a file over app approach, so your notes stay readable in any editor long after Serial Notes is gone.
No accounts · No servers · No telemetry
How it compares
Free, open source, and entirely on your Mac
Most meeting tools are cloud subscriptions that need an account and a connection. Serial Notes is a free, open-source app that runs start to finish on your machine.
| Serial Notes | Granola | Otter.ai | Fathom | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | Free, unlimited | Free*, then $14/mo | Free*, then $8/mo | Free*, then $15/mo |
| Open source | ||||
| Runs fully on-device | Partial | |||
| Works offline | ||||
| No account required | ||||
| No bot joins the call | ||||
| Notes are plain local files |
* Free tiers are capped — Granola 25 meetings total, Otter 300 minutes/month, Fathom 5 AI summaries/month. Granola records locally but enhances notes with cloud AI, so it needs a connection. Otter and Fathom now offer bot-free capture modes but default to a bot that joins the call. Details verified June 2026; see each product’s pricing page.