Local-first meeting notes for macOS

Your meetings, written up by your own Mac.

Put your MacBook on the table, or let Huddle listen to the other side of a call. Press stop and the notes write themselves — while nothing leaves your computer.

Download for macOS View source on GitHub

Q3 roadmap · design review

12 August 2026 14:30 41 min English

M Maya D Dylan auto 3 Speaker 3

Summary

Refine notes

The team reviewed the install experience. Bundling the speech models pushes the download past 5 GB, so they will ship the app alone and fetch the recommended models on first run, with the onboarding rewritten to explain the wait up front.

Decisions

Models download on first run instead of shipping inside the app bundle.11:52
Keep the menu-bar recorder in the release; it tested well.23:14

Action items

Find action items

Measure the bundle size without models Dylan 09:41
Rewrite the onboarding copy for the model download Maya Friday 12:04

Transcript

Click a speaker to rename · click text to seek

Maya11:38

If the models ship inside the app, the first download is enormous. Can we pull them after install instead?

Dylan11:52

Yes — we fetch the recommended set on first run, and let people point Huddle at whatever they already have in Ollama.

Speaker 312:04

Then I'll rewrite the onboarding before Friday so it explains the download up front.

Why Huddle

Every other notetaker uploads the room.

Meeting AI usually means a bot joining your call and your conversation living on someone else's server. Huddle does the whole job — transcription, speaker separation, summaries — on the machine already sitting in front of you. Turn off the Wi-Fi once the models are downloaded and it keeps working.

Audio recordingstays on disk

Transcript & speakersstays on disk

Summaries & action itemsstays on disk

Sent to a servernothing

Account requirednone

What it does

Record the room. Get notes you'd actually send.

Recording

In the room or on a call. Captures the microphone and, optionally, the audio of every other app — Teams, Zoom, Meet, FaceTime.
Menu bar mode. Close the window and a small recorder stays in the menu bar; ⌥⌘R starts and stops from anywhere.
Crash-safe. The file is finalised every second, so a dead battery still leaves a recoverable recording.
Import. Drop in existing audio and it gets the same treatment.

Notes

Who said what, with timestamps. Rename or merge speakers; Huddle suggests names it recognises from earlier meetings.
Summary, topics, decisions with evidence links back into the transcript — in any of 56 languages, whatever was spoken.
Action items extracted on demand and tracked across meetings until you tick them off.
Refine and Ask. Tell Huddle what it got wrong and it rewrites; ask one meeting, or all of them, a question.

Private by design

Everything runs locally — transcription, speaker separation and summaries. Fully offline once the models are downloaded.
Your data stays yours, in one folder under Application Support. Export any meeting as Markdown, text, SRT, JSON or the original audio.
Storage limit. Set how much disk recordings may use; the oldest audio is pruned first.

Works with your AI tools

MCP server. Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor and other MCP clients can search your meetings, read transcripts and pull open action items — without touching your filesystem.
Optional network access. Share the MCP server on your local network with API keys.
Bring your own models. Huddle finds what you already have in Ollama, LM Studio or the Hugging Face cache and downloads only what is missing.

For the terminal crowd

Your meetings, in your assistant.

Huddle ships an MCP server over the same services the app uses. Point Claude Code, Claude Desktop or Cursor at it and ask about last week's call without handing anyone a file. Settings → MCP prints the ready-made configuration for each client.

claude_desktop_config.json

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "huddle": {
      "command": "/Applications/Huddle.app/…/huddle-engine",
      "args": ["mcp"]
    }
  }
}

› search_meetings("pricing", limit: 5)
› get_transcript(meeting_id)
› list_action_items(status: "open")

Install

Two minutes, no account.

Download

Take Huddle-<version>-macos-arm64.zip from the latest release.

Install

Unzip it and drag Huddle.app into your Applications folder.

Get your models

Huddle checks what your Mac already has and downloads only what is missing.

Record

Press New Recording. Huddle transcribes the moment you stop and writes the summary on your own Mac.

Under the hood

Standing on good open source.

Huddle is MIT licensed, and so is the work it is built on.

Whisper transcription MLX Apple GPU CTranslate2 CPU sherpa-onnx diarization pyannote segmentation Ollama local LLMs Tauri app shell React interface FastAPI engine

Put your Mac on the table.

Free, open source, and the only place your meetings are stored is the machine you're reading this on.

Download for macOS View source on GitHub