Why Fieldnotes exists
I built Fieldnotes because I kept losing things in meetings. The meetings themselves were fine — you sit through them, you survive. What kept going missing was the stuff that mattered: the offhand commitment somebody made, the actual decision, the reason we agreed not to do the obvious thing.
I'd walk out of a 45-minute call with three bullet points and a sense I'd missed two more. A week later somebody would email me asking what we'd decided, and I'd open my notes and find a question mark. Or worse, a confident summary I'd written that turned out to be wrong.
If you spend any real time in meetings you probably know the feeling. You can't take good notes and pay real attention at the same time, and the more meetings you have the worse your notes get. It feeds itself.
I tried the obvious things — writing better notes, Otter, Granola. The transcription tools were fine, sometimes good, but every one of them had at least one thing that made me close it again.
The biggest one for me was speakers. We have a hybrid-remote policy, so there's always a mix of people in the room and people dialed in. Granola was great when everyone was on Google Meet — each remote person is on their own audio stream, so the speaker labels just work. But the second you have two or three people in a conference room sharing one mic, they all become Speaker 1, and you're back to writing the notes yourself.
The other one was privacy. Everything piped my work calls through somebody else's servers, and I didn't love the idea of every conversation I had at work getting uploaded somewhere. If your IT department cares about that kind of thing, you can't really use these tools on the calls that matter most anyway.
And there was pricing. I already pay for Claude and ChatGPT. Paying another twenty-something a month for a separate tool to summarize my meetings — when I could just hand the transcript to the agents I'm already paying for and get a better summary out of it — felt like the kind of subscription you sign up for once and resent for a year.
So I built the thing I actually wanted.
Fieldnotes is a Mac app that records meetings and turns them into speaker-labeled transcripts. It runs entirely on your machine. Nothing leaves your device.
Three things shape the product:
It runs on-device. Transcription happens locally with Whisper. Diarization happens locally with Pyannote — it works on the audio itself, so people sharing a mic in a conference room get separated, not lumped together. Both run on Apple Silicon. The first time you open the app it downloads the models once, and after that you're offline by default.
It hands you the transcript, not a summary. Summaries are useful, but honestly the transcript is the source of truth — it keeps the offhand commitment and the disagreement that mattered. Fieldnotes gives you the speaker-labeled transcript and lets you do whatever you want with it, including handing it to the AI agent you already pay for.
It costs money once. One payment, yours forever. There's no backend to maintain because there's no backend at all, so I could charge once and call it done.
That's the whole pitch.
If you live in meetings I think you'll like this. If you've also been burned by a transcription tool that turned out to be a cloud SaaS in a trench coat, even more.
You can try it at fieldnotes.fm. There's a refund if it's not for you.
I'm one person who built this because I needed it. Thanks for taking a look.
— Ryan