Nootle records your meetings (microphone and system audio), transcribes them on your Mac with speaker names, and lets you ask an AI about what was said. Point it at your project folders and it answers from those too, even live during a call.
Private by default. Recording and transcription happen on your Mac, and audio is never uploaded. Summaries and chat use the AI you pick: a local Ollama model keeps everything on-device, or bring an OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Groq, OpenRouter or Bedrock key, or your Claude or ChatGPT subscription through the Claude Code or Codex CLI. Local-only mode (Settings → Privacy) allows only local models. There's no telemetry. Crash reports are off unless you turn them on (Settings → Privacy), and never include meeting content. Nootle only goes online for things you set up, plus model downloads and update checks.
Features
- No bot in the call. Records mic and system audio from Zoom, Meet, Teams, or anything else, and can pop up when a call starts.
- Live transcript with speakers. Transcribed on your Mac with Parakeet, or Underdog Bark 3.0 Plus: a 210 MB English model that's as accurate (better on meetings). Speakers are told apart and named from the call's video tiles. Nootle can also learn voices and recognize them in later meetings.
- Summaries and action items. Every meeting is summarized when it ends, with templates you choose, and one click turns it into a follow-up email, a project update, minutes, or CRM notes, each in its own tab. Decisions and action items are collected across meetings.
- Commitment tracker. Follows what people promised across meetings: what's still owed, what slipped, and the moment a later meeting showed it done.
- Pre-meeting brief. A few minutes before a calendar meeting: who's coming, open action items, last time's decisions, and related docs (opt-in).
- Menu bar mode. Record, pause, jot a note and see what's next from the menu bar, with or without a Dock icon.
- Live Assist. During a call, answers questions from your documents and past meetings, including ones it hears asked aloud.
- Ask the Room. Listen to a meeting as a short spoken recap, each point in the voice of whoever raised it, made on your Mac. Then type a question and hear the answer in their voice.
- Translate any meeting. Read the transcript and summaries in another language, line by line and still synced to playback, with the AI you choose.
- Ask your meetings and docs. Chat across every meeting and your knowledge base (PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, web pages and more), with citations.
- Ask Nootle, in the meeting. Ask about the meeting you're looking at, or have it make changes: "put those in my notes", tag it, add or close action items, write a summary from a template, name a speaker, pin a comment to a moment. Each reply lists what it changed.
- Meeting Coach (opt-in). A private card after each call on how you showed up (talk share, interruptions, questions, filler words, pace), with trends over time.
- Your notes, expanded. Jot shorthand while recording, and highlight the moments that matter in one click (⌘⇧H). Nootle fills your notes out from the transcript afterwards, and summaries give your highlights extra attention.
- Snapshots. Captures shared slides and screens into your notes, and reads the text on them. Summaries cite slides as clickable thumbnails, and a slide recap says what was said while each was up.
- Workflows. Send recaps and action items to Slack, Notion, Linear, GitHub, Asana, Confluence, Obsidian, or email.
- Share links. End-to-end encrypted
nootle.ai links to a meeting's notes.
- AI connector. Claude, ChatGPT and other cloud AI apps connect to
nootle.ai/mcp and read the shared meetings you pick. Each person signs in with their own key, so it works for Claude Team workspaces too.
- Continue in Claude. One click opens a meeting in Claude, ChatGPT, Codex, Perplexity, or any app that takes a prompt in a link, with your own icon if you like.
- Built for agents. A CLI and an MCP server (with a read-only mode) give Claude Code and other agents your meetings, and let them pin notes to a meeting's timeline.
- Plain files you own. Export any meeting, or all of them, as Markdown, text, SRT or WebVTT. Import recordings and transcripts from Otter, Fathom, Granola, Zoom, Teams and Meet.
See every feature in detail.
Why Nootle
| Nootle | Granola | Otter | Meetily |
|---|
| Records without a bot joining the call | ✅ | ✅ | Desktop app only | ✅ |
| Transcription on your Mac | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ |
| Tells speakers apart, remembers names | ✅ free | "Me / Them" on desktop | ✅ | Pro |
| Any AI, including local models (Ollama) or your Claude / ChatGPT subscription | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ | ✅ |
| Full history as plain files you own | ✅ | Limited free history; encrypted local cache | Paid plans | ✅ |
| Answers from your own docs, live in the call (local knowledge base) | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| MCP server and CLI for agents | ✅ (read-only mode available) | MCP on paid plans | MCP (enterprise) | — |
| Open source | ✅ MIT | ❌ | ❌ | Open core |
| Price | Free | Free / $14 a month | Free / from $8.33 a month | Free / about $10 a month |
Competitor details are as of October 2026 and change often; check their sites.
Install
brew tap michellemayes/nootle https://github.com/michellemayes/nootle
brew install --cask nootle
Or download the latest .dmg from Releases. Nootle needs an Apple Silicon Mac (M1–M5) on macOS 14 or later. It updates itself from inside the app.
On first launch it asks for Microphone, Screen Recording (for system audio and Snapshots), and optionally Calendar (to name recordings after events).
On v0.1.15 or earlier, in-app updates fail. Download the latest .dmg and drag it over the old app once.
CLI and MCP server
nootle-cli ships inside the app. Add Nootle to Claude Code as an MCP server:
claude mcp add --scope user nootle -- /Applications/Nootle.app/Contents/MacOS/nootle-cli mcp
Add --read-only to the end to stop agents editing or sending anything. The CLI, MCP and URL scheme guide covers every command.
Cloud AI connector
Claude on the web, ChatGPT and other cloud AI apps can't run nootle-cli, so nootle.ai hosts a read-only MCP server for meetings you've shared. Add https://nootle.ai/mcp as a custom connector (in Claude: Settings → Connectors → Add custom connector). When it asks you to sign in, paste the key from Nootle's Settings → Integrations → AI connector (click Create connector key the first time). On a Claude Team or Enterprise plan an owner adds the connector once and each member signs in with their own key, reaching only their own meetings. It lists only the shares you tick Let AI connectors read this on in the Share menu, with the tools list_shared_meetings, get_shared_meeting, search_shared_meetings and read_share_link.
Sign-in is standard MCP OAuth (discovery, dynamic client registration, PKCE). nootle.ai has no accounts and keeps no sign-in state: client ids, codes and tokens are sealed with a server secret (OAUTH_SECRET, or one derived from the Blob token), and the tokens carry your key. Shares stay encrypted on nootle.ai. Your key opens its list of shares (and that list holds each share's key), so nootle.ai decrypts them in memory only while answering your AI, and never stores a key. Clients without OAuth can send the key itself as Authorization: Bearer <key>, and old nootle.ai/mcp/<key> links keep working. Reset key signs every AI app out; Turn off removes the connector.
Development
pnpm install
pnpm tauri dev
docs/development.md covers tests, releases, and how integration sign-in works. docs/layout.md has the rules that keep every page fitting any window size, checked by pnpm check:layout.
License
MIT
Models are downloaded when you pick them, not bundled, and Settings → Models shows what each takes on disk, deletes the ones you don't use, and cleans up unfinished downloads, audio from deleted meetings, and old logs. Underdog Bark 3.0 Plus is by Conway Research under CC-BY-4.0, derived from NVIDIA's Parakeet TDT 0.6B v3 and Moondream's parakeet-ultra.
