Overview
Oats is a free, open-source meeting notetaker from Ariso that lives in the macOS menu bar (with a Windows preview) and records meetings locally by capturing your system audio — so no bot ever appears in the call. When the meeting ends it streams a live transcript, labels speakers, and writes a clean Markdown summary with per-person action items and a conversation quality score. The defining choice is the backend: flip to Local and transcription plus the summary run entirely on your device through CoreML or an on-device language model, so nothing leaves the machine; stay on the free Ariso cloud for richer features like speaker recognition and coaching. Files land on disk as plain Markdown (an Obsidian-compatible vault), which means you own them, can sync them anywhere, and face no vendor lock-in. In our evaluation Oats is the strongest fit for consultants, lawyers, clinicians, and anyone blocked from cloud notetakers by policy or preference.
Key Features
- Bot-free local recording — captures any audio your Mac can hear (Zoom, Meet, Teams, phone, hallway chat) with no browser extension and no participant to admit.
- On-device transcription and summaries — Local backend runs speech and a language model on your machine, with zero API calls and no login required.
- Action-item extraction — pulls every follow-up with its owner into a Todos tab; tick it off in the notes or in Obsidian and it closes.
- Quality score — derives a meeting-quality signal from the conversation itself, useful as a quick retro metric.
- Local Markdown storage — notes are plain files in a vault you choose, exportable and movable anywhere.
- Open-source and auditable — MIT-licensed Tauri v2 / Rust / Vue app on GitHub that you can fork or self-host.
Pricing
| Plan | Price | For |
|---|---|---|
| Local (OSS) | $0 | On-device transcription + summaries, MIT license, no account |
| Ariso Cloud | Free to start, then ~$1/day | Individuals wanting speaker tags, multilingual, coaching |
| Teams | Custom (free 6 months for teams of 25 or fewer) | Companies adopting the Ariso backend at scale |
| Enterprise | Custom | Org-wide deployment and support |
Comparison
Compared to Otter, Oats removes the cloud-upload and bot-join model entirely — Otter sends audio to its servers and joins calls as a participant, while Oats can run fully offline. Against Fireflies, the difference is ownership: Fireflies stores notes in its workspace, whereas Oats writes local Markdown you control. Versus Fathom, which is bot-based and cloud-native, Oats is the pick when confidentiality rules out a third-party recorder — at the cost of Fathom’s deeper CRM integrations.