Offline meeting notes — record and transcribe with no internet

Daisy is built to make offline meeting notes without asking the internet for permission. Turn the network off — airplane mode, an air-gapped box, a no-cloud policy — and Daisy still records the meeting, transcribes it, labels who said what, and lets you search the result. Nothing is uploaded, no bot joins the call, and there's no account to sign into. The recording happens locally and the notes land on your disk.

What works with the network off

These steps run entirely on your machine. No connection required, not even briefly:

• Recording. Daisy captures system and mic audio straight to disk. No calendar, no meeting link, no bot in the room — you press record. Open formats: .wav for the source and .opus for a compact playback copy.
• Transcription. Speech-to-text runs on-device. You get a timestamped markdown transcript when the meeting ends.
• Speaker ID / diarization. Figuring out who spoke when is always on-device and always free. It never leaves your machine and never costs a credit.
• Keyword search. Once a transcript exists, searching across your notes is local — grep-speed over your own files, offline.

That covers the whole core loop: capture, transcribe, separate speakers, find it later. All of it offline.

What needs a model (and how to keep even that offline)

There is exactly one thing that wants a language model: the higher-level stuff — summaries, Q&A over the transcript, and coaching-style feedback. A raw transcript doesn't need a model; turning it into a summary does.

You have two honest paths, and one of them stays fully local:

• Run a local LLM. Point Daisy at Ollama or LM Studio on your own machine and summaries, Q&A, and coaching are 100% local. The transcript and the model both live on your disk, so this still works with the network off.
• Bring a cloud key (BYOK). If you'd rather use OpenAI, Anthropic, or Groq, Daisy sends only the transcript text — over HTTPS, with your own key, no proxy in the middle. That path needs internet, by definition, because the model lives somewhere else.
• Use no LLM at all. Daisy hands you the transcript plus a ready-made, copy-paste prompt. Take it to whatever tool you like, whenever you're back online — or never.

This is what "private by default, your choice to extend" means: the offline core is the default, and the cloud is something you opt into deliberately, key in hand.

Your notes live on your disk

Everything Daisy produces is a plain file in a folder you chose. Audio is .wav and .opus; transcripts and summaries are markdown. There's no proprietary database to export from and no server-side copy to delete. Back them up, grep them, drop them in your own vault, or check them into a repo — they're yours, in formats that will still open in a decade.

No account. No email signup. Nothing to log into before you can record.

License checks are offline too

A lot of "local" software still phones home to verify a license, which quietly breaks the moment you're offline or air-gapped. Daisy doesn't. The license is a signed token sitting on your disk; Daisy verifies the signature locally and never calls out to check it. One license covers three devices, on Linux, Windows, and macOS (Apple Silicon .dmg). There's a 30-day trial, and the trial works offline too.

A note on live captions, since strictly-offline readers ask: on desktops and Apple Silicon Macs, live captions run on-device — offline. On other laptops you choose: on-device live (heavier), or BYOK Deepgram realtime (which streams audio out and needs internet), or skip live entirely and take the full transcript at the end (offline). Deepgram is only the optional cloud path for laptop live captions — if you want strictly offline, use on-device live or just take the complete transcript when the meeting ends.

Good fits: planes, air-gapped, no-cloud policies

Offline meeting notes stop being a nice-to-have in a few situations:

• On a plane. Record an interview or a working session at 35,000 feet with the wifi off, and walk off with a finished, searchable transcript.
• Air-gapped machines. A box that's never touched a network can still do the full capture-transcribe-diarize-search loop, plus local-LLM summaries if you've installed one.
• No-cloud by policy. When sending audio or transcripts to a third party is simply off the table — compliance, contracts, classification — Daisy keeps the data on the device and verifies its own license without reaching out.

If your requirement is "the notes happen, and nothing leaves this machine unless I say so," that's the design Daisy starts from.