Oats

Oats is an open-source meeting notetaker from Ariso that lives in the macOS menu bar. It records the meeting from the machine you are already sitting at, so no meeting-bot participant ever appears in the call — a practical difference for client discovery calls, interviews and anything covered by a recording policy.

Hit record and Oats streams a live transcript as people speak, labels who said what, and writes a clean Markdown summary when you stop. Recordings, transcripts and notes land in a searchable library you can share through the native macOS share sheet.

Two backends, both free

• Ariso (cloud) — sign in and audio streams to Ariso for real-time transcription and cloud storage. The convenient option when you want web sharing.
• Local (on-device) — no account at all. Transcription runs through CoreML on the Apple Neural Engine (Parakeet ONNX on Windows) and the summary is written by an on-device language model, so nothing leaves the machine. Files are written to ~/.ariso/recordings/ as recording.mp3, transcript.md and ari-note.md — plain files you own rather than rows in somebody's database.

Requirements and install

macOS 14 or later on Apple Silicon is fully supported; Windows 11 is in release preview and Windows 10 is planned. Install through Homebrew or download the DMG from GitHub Releases — builds are code-signed and notarised by Apple, and the app updates itself.

Under the hood

Oats is a Tauri v2 desktop app with a Vue 3 and Vite front end over a Rust core, using FluidAudio and MLX for on-device inference. The whole thing is MIT-licensed on GitHub and takes outside contributions.

It is a good fit for consultants, researchers, engineers and anyone who wants accurate meeting notes without a third-party bot in the room or a subscription attached.