Fieldnotes captures mic + system audio on your Mac, transcribes the words and identifies who said what — all on-device. The output is clean markdown that drops into Claude, Codex, Cursor, or ChatGPT. Your agents already do this. Why pay monthly for theirs?
If we move the API contract to Thursday, can design still make the review?
Yes — as long as the copy is locked by Wednesday.
Locking it. I’ll own that.
One-time purchase No subscriptions No cloud macOS 14+, Apple Silicon
Whether it's $20 a month for Claude Pro or $200 for Max, you have a serious AI agent on your Mac that already summarizes, searches, drafts, and reasons. Granola charges another $14/user/month — $168 a year, every year — to do that work in their cloud, under their account, on a copy of your audio. Fieldnotes is $14.99 once.
5-year cost: $840 vs. $14.99. The savings buy a lot of Claude Max tokens.
You keep $825.01Granola is great if you live on Zoom and don't mind their subscription or their cloud. Three things change once you walk into a conference room:
Same two minutes of audio. One app tags where the sound came from. The other separates who was actually talking.
Labels every voice as either “Me” or “Them” based on whether the audio came from your mic or your speakers. That isn't speaker identification — it's audio-source tagging. Their iPhone app does face-to-face diarization; the Mac app doesn't.
Source: Granola docs — “only our iPhone app can recognize different speakers”
Runs real speaker diarization locally on your Mac's Neural Engine for every recording. A four-person conference room becomes four distinct speakers, with a post-recording wizard that lets you name each one. Names you've used before pop up as one-tap chips on the next meeting.
Audio and transcripts are uploaded and processed in their cloud. The notes are tied to a Granola account. If you cancel, you lose access to your own meeting history.
Audio stays at ~/Library/Application Support/Fieldnotes/ on your Mac. Transcripts are plain markdown, written to whichever export folder you pick (default ~/Documents/Fieldnotes/ — point it at an Obsidian vault, a sync folder, anywhere). No account, no server, nothing to cancel.
Their AI, their prompts, their formats. You can adjust templates, but the summarization happens server-side under their account. You can't point it at your own Claude Max session.
The AI you already pay for. Drop the markdown into Claude Code, Cursor, ChatGPT — or use the bundled process-fieldnotes Claude skill. Same prompts you'd write for anything else; same agent context.
Granola wins for teams that want polished out-of-the-box summaries and shared workspaces. Fieldnotes wins for individuals who already pay for a serious AI subscription, take a lot of in-person meetings, and want to keep their data on their own disk.
Click record. Fieldnotes captures your mic + system audio simultaneously, so in-person, Zoom, Meet, and Slack Huddles all work. Nothing leaves your Mac.
Recording your meeting
12:04
Whisper large-v3-turbo handles the transcription; Pyannote handles speaker separation. Both run on your Mac's Neural Engine — no audio leaves the device. You get speaker-attributed, timestamped markdown plus a wizard to tag each cluster by name.
Add your name in Settings and confirm yourself once — from then on, Fieldnotes recognizes your voice and fills your name in for you.
Markdown gets written to whatever folder you pick — an Obsidian vault, an iCloud-synced folder, anywhere. Default is ~/Documents/Fieldnotes/. Drop the folder into Claude Code, Cursor, ChatGPT, or use the included process-fieldnotes Claude skill for instant summaries and follow-ups.
# Design review — onboarding v2 **Date:** Monday, May 18, 2026 at 2:00 PM **Duration:** 00:48:21 **Participants:** Ryan, Jeff, Emily --- ## Transcript **Jeff** _4:12_ If we move the API contract to Thursday, can design still make the review? **Emily** _4:19_ Yes — as long as the copy is locked by Wednesday. **Ryan** _4:25_ Locking it. I'll own that. --- *Recorded with Fieldnotes*
Fieldnotes outputs clean, speaker-attributed markdown. Every modern AI agent can read it. We ship a real Claude Code skill that turns your meeting corpus into a queryable knowledge base.
Drop in our process-fieldnotes skill. Four commands out of the box:
/process-fieldnotessummarize new meetings with decisions, action items, and open questions/fieldnotes-recap <scope>synthesize across a day, week, topic, or person/draft-followup <meeting>generate a follow-up email in your voice/fieldnotes-search <query>search across all your meetings with speaker + timestamp context$ curl -O https://fieldnotes.fm/skill/SKILL.md $ mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills/process-fieldnotes $ mv SKILL.md ~/.claude/skills/process-fieldnotes/
>
Build a Custom GPT that reads from a folder synced via iCloud Drive or Google Drive. Paste the prompt below as system instructions.
You read meeting transcripts in markdown format from a synced folder. Each file has a metadata header (Date, Duration, Participants) followed by a speaker-attributed transcript. When asked to summarize, extract explicit decisions, action items (with owners), and open questions — don't paraphrase, quote the moment of decision.
Add ~/Documents/Fieldnotes/ to your workspace. Cursor's native agent indexes the markdown automatically. Use the chat panel to query: “What did we decide about pricing across this week's meetings?”
Both can read directories with a single command. Point them at the export folder and ask. The Claude skill's prompt template translates directly — copy it from the SKILL.md.
Add the export folder to a VS Code / JetBrains workspace. Copilot Chat picks up the markdown context for inline Q&A.
The output is plain text. Paste it. The whole point is that you don't need a special integration — the markdown speaks every agent's language.
Audio, transcription, and diarization all run locally on Apple Silicon. Zero network calls during a recording.
Captures both sides of a call simultaneously. Remote and in-person voices land in the same transcript.
Real on-device speaker separation, not silence-gap heuristics. Plus a post-stop wizard to tag each cluster by name.
Names you've used before pop up as one-tap chips on the next recording. Recurring meeting members stop costing you typing.
One click on your next meeting starts a recording with the speaker count pre-set from the invite — no menu hunting between back-to-backs. Reads from macOS Calendar (iCloud, Google, Exchange).
Speaker-attributed, timestamped, with a metadata header. Drop into Obsidian, Notion, your AI of choice — or just cat the file.
When AirPods reconnect mid-meeting or the OS reroutes audio, Fieldnotes rebuilds the engine and keeps writing to the same file.
No Electron. No Chromium. ~10 MB on disk, and nothing runs through the models while you record. Transcribing afterward is real work, so it stays at low priority, pauses when your next recording starts, and frees its memory when it's done. The on-device models add ~2 GB once, then live on your filesystem.
Most landing pages hide their limits. Here are ours, up front:
No shared workspaces or org-wide search. If you need collaborative meeting notes for a team, buy Granola.
Summarization happens in the agent you choose. That's the whole point, but it's an extra click compared to a “summarize” button.
We read your calendar. We don't post back, invite people, or create events.
Mac only. Apple Silicon only. Intel Macs literally cannot run the on-device models at usable speed.
An hour-long meeting takes a few minutes to process after it ends (about 4 on an M4 Pro, longer on older Macs), and your Mac will notice. Fieldnotes keeps it at low priority and pauses it while you record — or switch off automatic transcription and run it when it suits you.
The Claude skill drafts them; we don't have a “send the recap” button. Your agent, your call.
The product is opinionated about being small. That's the deal.
FIELDNOTES · MAC · LICENSEOne-time purchase. No subscriptions.
Distributed via Gumroad. Code-signed and notarized by Apple. The app is yours to keep even if Fieldnotes the company ceases to exist tomorrow — nothing depends on our servers.
Something else? hi@fieldnotes.fm — a human reads every one.
Both stay on your Mac. Audio files (.m4a) live at ~/Library/Application Support/Fieldnotes/audio/. Markdown transcripts get written to an export folder you choose in settings — the default is ~/Documents/Fieldnotes/, but you can point it anywhere (a sync folder, an Obsidian vault, wherever). Nothing is ever uploaded. There is no Fieldnotes account. There is no Fieldnotes server.
Whisper large-v3-turbo for speech-to-text, Pyannote for speaker diarization — the same models the open-source community has converged on, packaged as Core ML builds (WhisperKit and SpeakerKit from Argmax) and running on Apple's Neural Engine. They download once on first launch (~2 GB total) and live entirely on your filesystem — no network calls during a recording.
No, not to use Fieldnotes — capture, transcription, and diarization all work offline. You need an AI subscription (Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, anything) to process the notes afterward into summaries and followups. The value of Fieldnotes scales with the quality of the agent reading the output.
Sorry — won't work. The on-device transcription model needs Apple Silicon to run at usable speed. The app refuses to launch on Intel hardware so you don't waste a purchase.
All three. In-person uses mic only. Zoom / Meet / Slack Huddles / Webex use mic + system audio — we mix both streams before transcription so remote voices land in the transcript too.
Audio never leaves your Mac. Transcripts are plain markdown files you own. There is no “Fieldnotes account” to subpoena. If you're recording other people, get their consent — that's your legal responsibility, not ours.
The export is plain markdown. Drop the folder into Obsidian and you're done. Notion: paste or use a sync tool. Apple Notes: drag-import.
You keep using the version you bought. The model files live on your disk; we don't gate them behind a server. The app would still work in 5 years on a Mac that can still run macOS 14+.
The 30-day refund is the trial. Record a week of meetings, run them through your agent, decide. If it's not for you, one email gets you the full $14.99 back — no forms, no survey, no “are you sure” loop.