EarshotMeeting notes that never leave your PC.
Earshot is an independent, open-source AI notetaker for Windows. It records your meetings locally — no bot joins the call — and keeps the recordings and notes on your own machine. It's made in Australia by a one-person software studio, free to self-host, with an optional paid tier for people who'd rather not run the AI themselves.
Why Earshot exists
Most AI notetakers work the same way: a bot joins your call as a visible participant, the audio is streamed to a company's servers, and your transcripts live in someone else's cloud. That's convenient, and for plenty of people it's fine. But it means the most sensitive record of your work day — every negotiation, every one-on-one, every client call — sits on infrastructure you don't control, often used to improve the vendor's own models by default.
Earshot started from a simple preference: the recording and the notes should be yours, on your computer, by default. So Earshot records both sides of the conversation locally, on your Windows PC, in any app you can hear — Zoom, Teams, Meet, Webex, a softphone on speaker. Nothing joins the meeting. When you self-host, the only thing that leaves your machine is the audio you choose to send to the AI provider whose key you supplied.
Open source, and why that matters
The full Earshot desktop app is on GitHub under the MIT licence. You can read exactly how it records, where it stores things, and what it sends over the network — or fork it and change any of that. Open source is the difference between trusting a privacy promise and being able to check it. For a tool that handles your private conversations, being able to check matters.
Two ways to run it
Earshot is the same app either way; only the engine room changes.
- Self-host (free forever). Bring your own keys for transcription and AI — a free local Whisper server, Groq's free tier, Deepgram, OpenAI, Anthropic, or a fully local model. You pay the providers directly, and your data never touches an Earshot server.
- Earshot Plus (US$9/month). We run the transcription and AI so you never touch an API key. Audio passes through our proxy to be processed and is discarded, never stored, and never used to train models. There's a 7-day free trial, and you can switch back to self-hosting anytime.
If you're weighing the two, the FAQ covers the trade-offs, and the pricing section lays them out side by side.
Who builds Earshot
Earshot is made by Hayden Whittle, an independent software developer in Queensland, Australia. It's a genuinely small operation — no venture funding, no growth team, no data-broker business model. That shapes the product: Earshot makes money when people find Plus worth $9 a month, not by monetising your meetings. The self-hosted app is, and will stay, free and open source.
The company
The service is operated by Earshot App (ABN 28 119 806 160), based in Queensland, Australia. Earshot Plus subscriptions are sold through Paddle, our merchant of record, which handles payment and local taxes. The open-source desktop app is licensed separately under the MIT licence. See the privacy policy, terms and refund policy for the details.
Get in touch
Real emails reach a real person. Feature requests, questions, or a nudge for the macOS version — write to [email protected], or open an issue on GitHub.
Try it on your next meeting.
Self-host it free forever, or start a 7-day Plus trial — no bot, no cloud lock-in.