HyNote

HyNote is an AI note taker for meetings, lectures, calls and documents, available as a Mac app, an iPhone app and a web app. Its distinguishing choice is where the work happens: transcription runs on your own device, so nothing is uploaded to be turned into text and there is no per-minute meter to watch.

Capture without a bot in the call

On macOS, HyNote records system audio and microphone input from whatever is playing — Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, a browser tab, any other Mac app — rather than sending a bot to join the meeting on your behalf. That matters practically as well as socially: it works on calls where you cannot add a participant, and nobody else sees a recorder in the attendee list. The transcript builds live as people speak, with speakers identified as it goes.

Beyond live audio, it ingests recorded audio files, PDFs and other documents, images, YouTube links and saved web pages, so a single note can be assembled from several sources.

Understand and reuse

Once a recording is captured, HyNote produces a structured summary with key points and action items, generates FAQs from a set of notes, and offers a "chat with all your notes" search that answers questions across the whole library rather than a single document. Notes are organised with tags, folders and snippets.

Requirements and pricing

The Mac app needs macOS 14 or later and runs on Apple silicon or Intel; the team recommends macOS 26.4+ on an M1 or newer, which is also what the on-device Local AI summarisation requires (it additionally needs Apple Intelligence enabled for your region). On-device transcription and Local AI are free with no cap. Optional paid Online AI plans handle longer transcripts, larger files and more demanding analysis, and add advanced exports and collaboration, with a 7-day trial.

The iPhone app is free to download, is listed under Productivity, and carries a 4.8-star average across roughly 7,000 ratings.