Oats

<p>Hey Product Hunt! 👋</p><p></p><p>We think AI meeting notes have become useful enough to be a basic utility. And basic utilities should be <strong>free, open source, and private by default.</strong></p><p></p><p>That’s why we built <strong>Oats 🥣 -- a free, open-source AI meeting note taker for Mac &amp; Windows.</strong></p><p></p><p><strong>Why Oats?</strong></p><p></p><p>Most AI meeting tools require a bot to join your calls, send your conversations to the cloud, lock useful features behind a subscription, or use your data in ways that aren’t always obvious.</p><p></p><p>We wanted a different option.</p><p></p><p><strong>Oats runs locally on your computer.</strong> It can record your meetings without a bot joining the call, then transcribe and summarize the conversation on-device, using local AI models.</p><p></p><p>Your recordings stay local. And because Oats is open source, you can <strong>use it, audit it, modify it, or build on top of it.</strong></p><p></p><p><strong>No meeting bot. No model training on your data. No data lock-in.</strong></p><p></p><p><strong>What you can do with Oats:</strong></p><ul><li><p>Record meetings without inviting a bot</p></li><li><p>Transcribe and summarize locally</p></li><li><p>Keep recordings on your own computer</p></li><li><p>Run with on-device LLMs</p></li><li><p>Inspect and modify the source code</p></li><li><p>Use it completely free</p></li></ul><p>For those who want more, Oats can also connect to the <strong>Ariso cloud backend</strong> for enhanced transcription, multi-language support, speaker recognition, assessments, coaching, automatic follow-up tracking, and more.</p><p></p><p>Even when you use our cloud features, <strong>we will never use your meeting data to train our models</strong>, including on the free plan.</p><p></p><p>Oats is also our first step toward open-sourcing more of what we build at Ariso.</p><p></p><p>So we’d love the Product Hunt community to put it through its paces. Tell us what’s missing. Break something. Open an issue. Build something weird on top of it. Or contribute directly. 🥣</p><p></p><p>We’ll be here all day answering questions.</p><p></p><p>— The Ariso Team</p>

<p>congrats on the launch, its a great product.</p><p>quick question what is the most unique feature of Oats which make it different from other products</p>

<p>We built Oats because we believe people should have more control over their data. Privacy shouldn’t be something you trade away for convenience, and useful software shouldn’t require trusting a black box.<br><br>Oats is open source because we value FOSS: people should be able to inspect it, improve it, run it themselves, and keep ownership of their work. If you care about private, transparent tools, we’d love for you to check it out.</p>

<p>Do we really need another AI meeting notetaker? 😅</p><p></p><p>I honestly thought the answer was no.</p><p></p><p>Then I found out that a tool I had been using for months was using my data to train its models. That left a pretty bad taste in my mouth, especially because it wasn’t something I realized when I started using it.</p><p></p><p>At first, I went looking for alternatives. I tried a bunch of the "free" ones that weren’t really free. And I couldn't find a great option that runs as a locally contained app without having to sign up to anything AND didn't require a bot joining every meeting.</p><p></p><p>So… here we are... with Oats!</p><p></p><p>I've now been using it for pretty much every meeting I have. Turns out I did need another notetaker, just not another one built the same way. </p>