My mom and I are big note-taker enthusiasts. To perform my son-ly duty, I've tried a lot of meeting note-takers in hopes to give her the best recommendations…

# Our criteria were:

1. Cheap / No subscription
2. In-room speaker detection
3. Complete data privacy
4. Mac **and** **Windows** support

**Bonus:**

1. Customizable AI summaries
2. Upload external recordings
3. Intuitive enough that Mom would actually use it

Nothing checked every box, so I started building one for her as a little side project. Eleven months later, I’m somehow still cooking on this, and it has ballooned into something much bigger…

# What I built (Samurai Scribe ⚔️):

1. GPU-accelerated transcription, speaker identification, and summarization, all running locally on Mac and Windows
2. Captures mic and computer audio into separate channels without adding meeting bots
3. No accounts, and no meeting data leaves your device!
4. **A ridiculously customizable AI summarization engine**… with prompts/workflows you can tune to produce anything from concise meeting notes to detailed action items, decisions, highlights, etc. And it works surprisingly well with small open-source models.
5. **All transcripts and notes are saved as plain Markdown files on your drive**

That last is my favorite. There is no proprietary format to escape from. If Samurai Scribe disappeared tomorrow, your notes would still be sitting on your drive in a format you can read.

This is *heavily* inspired by my beloved **Obsidian** (the obvious GOAT of note-taking apps 💜). And it works great with Claude Code, or whatever other AI tools you want to throw at it.

# Pricing:

* Free tier, has everything except for the larger Whisper transcription models.
* $19 **one-time** purchase for Pro includes larger Whisper models and some future features to come. This price will go up after beta testing is complete.

# Who is it for?

**Students**, **journalists**, **interviewers**, and anyone who sits in a lot of meetings and wants the notes to stay on their own machine.

# Why I’m doing it:

I’m a solo developer with a passion for DIY and optimization. The mantra for this app has basically been: **Flexible**. **Future-Proof**. ***You*** ***see all your files***. I want my notes on-hand to plug into whatever hot AI tool comes next.  
  
Samurai Scribe is in **public beta**, so it definitely isn't bug-free or yet. But it's finally ready for people beyond my early testers. I'd especially love feedback from people with opinions on **privacy, local AI, Markdown workflows, or meeting notes**.

Huge thanks to all my early beta testers who have already put in a ton of work figuring getting through bugs with me. You have been instrumental and I don’t know how I got so lucky 🫶



I built a meeting transcription + note-taking app for my mom. 11 months later, it's ready for the world 😌