Granola is one of the best-loved AI note-takers around, and for good reason: no bot joins your call, the notes are clean, and it now runs on Windows as well as Mac. But if your meetings can’t leave your computer — client calls, interviews, anything under NDA, or a company policy that says no — Granola isn’t built for that.

This is a guide to what Granola actually does with your audio, what “works offline” should mean, and the Windows apps that keep everything on your own PC.

Disclosure: I make Samurai Scribe, one of the apps below. I’ve tried to be fair to the others, and every claim about them links to their own pages as of September 2026.

What Granola does with your meetings

Granola records your microphone and your computer’s audio on your own machine, without a bot. What happens next is in the cloud. By Granola’s own description, audio is sent over an encrypted connection to transcription providers such as Deepgram and AssemblyAI, and your transcript and notes are sent to AI providers such as OpenAI and Anthropic to write the enhanced notes. Granola says the audio is deleted once it has been transcribed, and your notes are stored in its US-hosted cloud.

That’s a thoughtful design, and Granola holds SOC 2 Type 2 certification. It’s also a different promise from “your meeting never leaves your computer”. If you need the second one, you need an app that transcribes and summarizes locally.

Granola’s pricing, for reference: a free Basic plan with limited meeting history, and Business at $14 per user per month for unlimited history (pricing).

What “works offline” should mean

Plenty of apps say “private” or “no bot”. Those aren’t the same as local. Before you trust a meeting app with sensitive calls, check that:

Transcription runs on your computer. Your audio is never uploaded, even briefly.
Speaker labels run on your computer. Working out who said what shouldn’t need a server either.
Summaries run on your computer. Or at least they can, without pasting an API key for a cloud AI.
Your notes are files you own. Ideally plain text you can open, search and back up without the app.
It still works with the Wi-Fi off. Once the AI models are downloaded, a real offline app doesn’t care.

Local meeting note-takers for Windows

Most of the well-known local apps are Mac-only. MacWhisper, Trace and Minute don’t run on Windows at all. These do:

App	Price	Speaker labels	Summaries	Worth knowing
Samurai Scribe	Free; Pro $19 one-time during beta	Yes, on the free plan, including people in the same room	Local AI model by default, installed by the setup wizard; scriptable; plus an assistant that answers from every meeting	Saves every meeting as Markdown in a folder you choose; works with Obsidian
Meetily	Free, open source; Pro $120/year	Speaker diarization is Pro	Ollama (local) or your own API key	Open source (MIT); the Windows installer needs an AVX2-capable CPU (README)
Anarlog (formerly Hyprnote)	Free locally; paid cloud tiers	—	Any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, including Ollama	Open source; Windows build is still beta
OpenWhispr	Free tier	Yes, locally	Meeting notes with decisions and action items	Also a dictation app; runs on Windows, Mac and Linux
Owl Meeting	Activation code; free access on request	Yes	Local templates via Ollama	Windows only; runs on CPU

If open source matters most to you, start with Meetily or Anarlog. If you want speaker labels and summaries without paying or configuring anything, and your notes as plain files, that’s what I built Samurai Scribe for.

Private meeting notes on Windows, step by step

Here’s the whole flow with Samurai Scribe. The other apps work along similar lines.

1. Install it

Download the Windows installer (Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit). The installer is code-signed, so Windows shows who published it. While the signature builds reputation, SmartScreen may still ask you to confirm: click More info → Run anyway. On first launch you choose a folder for your meetings, and the app downloads its speech models once (about 1.5 GB). A GPU with Vulkan support makes transcription much faster, but it also runs on the CPU.

2. Record an online meeting — no bot

Start a recording before your Teams, Zoom or Google Meet call. Samurai Scribe captures your microphone and your computer’s audio as two separate channels, so your voice and the other participants stay cleanly apart. Nobody sees a bot join, and your audio is not sent anywhere. Windows needs no special permission to capture desktop audio.

3. Or record in the room

For an in-person meeting or interview, just record with your microphone. Speaker detection runs on your PC and separates the voices in the room, and you can rename “Speaker 1” to a real name once for the whole meeting.

4. Get the transcript and summary

When you stop recording, the transcript arrives with speaker labels, followed by a summary written by a local AI model — no API key, no upload. The default summary covers decisions and action items. If you want something different, the summary is a script you can edit: per-speaker digests, interview notes, whatever your meetings need.

5. Find your notes as files

Every meeting is a folder on your drive with the transcript, summary, notes and recording in plain Markdown and audio. If that folder is an Obsidian vault, Samurai Scribe detects it and adds wikilinks. If the app disappeared tomorrow, your notes would still be there.

In August 2026 a federal judge allowed the core claims in a class action against Otter.ai to go ahead, including wiretap claims, partly because Otter allegedly kept recordings and used them for its own purposes (summary). A local app removes that third party entirely: no company receives your audio at all.

It doesn’t remove your own responsibility. Recording laws depend on where you and the other participants are, and many places require everyone’s consent. Tell people you’re taking notes, whichever app you use. (This isn’t legal advice.)

FAQ

Does Granola work offline? No. Granola’s transcription and note-writing run through cloud providers, so it needs an internet connection.

Is local transcription accurate enough? Modern Whisper models running on your own PC are very accurate for clear audio. Samurai Scribe’s free plan includes Whisper Tiny, Base and Small and NVIDIA Parakeet; Pro adds the largest models for accents, noisy rooms and technical vocabulary. To hear one on your own audio before you buy, download it in Settings → AI Models → Transcription and try it in Compare models.

What PC do I need? Windows 10 or 11 (64-bit) and at least 8 GB of RAM, with 16 GB recommended. A graphics card with Vulkan support (most recent NVIDIA, AMD and Intel GPUs) speeds things up a lot.

Can I import recordings I already have? Yes. Record on your phone or any other device, then import the audio (WAV, MP3, M4A, FLAC or MP4).

Can I use it with Obsidian? Yes. Point Samurai Scribe at your vault and each meeting lands there as Markdown.