Common questions,straight answers.

A meeting notetaker and dictation tool that runs on your own Mac or Windows computer. It records meetings without a bot in the call, transcribes them on your machine, writes structured notes, and types what you dictate straight into any app.

No. Recording and transcription run on your machine and the audio is never uploaded. If you turn the optional AI layer on, only transcript text is sent, only for the step you asked for. With AI off, nothing is sent anywhere.

Not for the app. Recording, transcription, notes and search work with no account, no card and no network, and stay free. You only create an account if you turn on Softspoken AI, the optional cloud layer.

We recommend you always do. Recording laws differ between Australian states and between countries; in much of Australia you need everyone's consent to record a private conversation, and it is your responsibility to get it. Softspoken never announces itself in a call or a room, so telling people is on you. A line that works: "Quick heads-up: I'm taking notes with Softspoken on my computer. If you'd rather I didn't, just say. Happy to share the notes afterwards if you'd like a copy."

Not today. Your meetings, notes and dictionary live on each device, and nothing is uploaded. Encrypted, optional sync is on our radar; if we ever build it, it will be end to end encrypted, so we could not read your meetings even then.

It listens from your computer: your microphone on one channel and the call's own audio on another. Nothing joins the meeting, and nothing appears in the participant list.

Yes. Open your laptop and it takes the minutes from the conversation in the room. There is no call to join, which is exactly why bot-based notetakers cannot do this.

Everything local does: recording, transcription, notes and search. The AI layer needs a connection at the moment you use it.

All of them. Softspoken records the audio on your own computer instead of joining the call, so it needs no integration with Zoom, Teams, Google Meet or anything else, and there is no plugin to get approved. The same goes for a conversation with no software in it at all, like a meeting around a table.

They capture your meeting and then transcribe it on their servers. Softspoken transcribes on your own computer, so the audio never leaves it, everything local keeps working with no connection, and there is no vendor holding your meetings. Softspoken also does dictation and meeting notes in one app, ships the same features on Mac and Windows, and can be bought once instead of rented. One thing that is no longer unusual: recording without a bot in the call. Several of them now offer that too, and Fireflies has added dictation. The comparison table on our home page sets it out claim by claim, with every column read from that vendor's own website.

The comparison table, claim by claim

Your audio never leaves your computer, so there is nothing to cross a border. If you turn on Softspoken AI, the transcript text for the one step you asked for is processed in Sydney, Australia, and returned, and is not stored. If you bring your own AI key instead, the text goes to the provider you chose, wherever they process it. With AI off, nothing is sent anywhere.

That is what it was built for. Because transcription runs on your own machine, a confidential conversation is never handed to a transcription vendor, and by default the audio is deleted once the notes are written. If you use the AI layer, only transcript text for that one step is sent, it is processed in Sydney and never stored, and you can run it on your own AI account instead or leave AI off entirely. Whether a given conversation may be recorded at all is a separate question, and that one is yours: see the consent question above.

Yes. Softspoken records locally on your machine and does not join or change the meeting, so it runs happily alongside Teams, Zoom or any other platform's own recording. The official recording usually belongs to whoever started it: with Softspoken you keep your own private transcript and summary on your device, whether or not anyone shares theirs. The usual consent rules still apply: see the consent question above.

With meeting reminders on, Softspoken checks locally whether a meeting seems to have started: whether a conferencing app is using your microphone, and, if you connect a calendar, whether an event is about to begin. The microphone and app check never leaves your device. If you connect a calendar link, your device fetches that link directly from your calendar provider, the same way your calendar app does, and reads the events on your device. No meeting content is in that request and nothing about your meetings is sent to us. You can mute reminders per app, or turn reminders off entirely, in Settings.

It cleans a dictation into finished writing and turns a meeting into a summary with decisions and action items, in whichever style suits the room: a standard summary, an executive brief, formal minutes, an action-items list for standups, a lecture write-up or a workshop record. Softspoken AI is A$19 a month or A$180 a year after a 14-day free trial, the Free plan keeps a monthly allowance, and you can also bring your own key or leave AI off entirely.

In Sydney, Australia. Your transcript text is processed in memory for your request and returned. We do not store it, log it, or use it to train anything.

Yes. Pro, Perpetual and Business can run the AI layer on your own Anthropic key or AWS Bedrock account. Your text goes directly to your provider, never through us.

Yes. Pro, Perpetual and Business include the MCP connector: a small local server that lets Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor and other MCP-capable tools read your meeting library (search, summaries, transcripts, action items, stats) and mark an action item done. It runs on your computer and opens no network port, so your library still never leaves your machine on our account. One thing to know plainly: when you connect an AI tool, the meeting content you ask about goes to that tool, and what it does with your data is governed by that tool's provider. Connect only tools you trust. Setup is copy and paste, from Settings, then AI, inside the app.

A Mac with Apple silicon on macOS 15 or newer, or a 64-bit Windows 10 or 11 machine. On Windows it installs for your user only, so no administrator password is needed.

Teach it. Your Dictionary keeps the names and terms of your world on your machine and uses them to hear you better, and you can correct a mistake straight from a transcript.

The local app is free forever, with no subscription. The AI layer is a subscription if you want ours, or you can pay A$299 once for Perpetual, which includes updates forever and runs AI on your own keys.

It is built to. Audio never leaves the device, only transcript text is sent and only when you use AI, credentials live in the operating system's secure store, and the app has no telemetry. The security page lists the entire network surface, and hello@softspoken.io answers IT questions with engineering answers.

The security page

Softspoken is in closed beta. Join the waitlist and we will email you when it is ready for you.

Nothing is thrown away. Actions you have already accepted or ticked keep their state, anything new in the fresh summary is added as a suggestion for you to accept, and anything the new summary dropped is flagged rather than deleted. If you edited the summary by hand, the app warns you before replacing it. The notes you type during a meeting are always saved and always shown in the app, and they stay private to your notes pane unless you say otherwise: two switches on each meeting decide whether they also inform the AI summary and whether they appear in exports, and both start off. Turn the summary switch on and your notes become the authoritative record, taking precedence over the transcript wherever the two disagree.

Softspoken reads a private calendar link so it can remind you when a meeting is about to start. In Outlook: open Calendar, go to Settings, then Calendar, then Shared calendars, choose Publish a calendar, pick the calendar and its permissions, select Publish, then copy the ICS link and paste it into Softspoken's Settings → Meetings, under Meeting reminders. In Google Calendar: open Settings, choose the calendar, open Integrate calendar, and copy the Secret address in iCal format. On a Mac you can use the native Calendar option instead, with no link at all. Your device fetches the link directly from your calendar provider; nothing about your meetings comes to us.

Yes, and the core needs no network at all: recording, transcription and dictation run on the device with the bundled speech model. Everything else is outbound HTTPS on port 443 to a short list of hosts, with no inbound ports, and every connection verifies TLS through the operating system's trust store, so a corporate root deployed by IT just works. The list and the details are on the network requirements page.

Network requirements

Today, no. Your recordings, transcripts and notes live only on your machine, and that is the point. On the roadmap for paid plans: optional cloud backup of your transcripts and notes, end-to-end encrypted, text only, never audio, off by default. If you lose a laptop, your meeting record does not go with it. Nothing changes if you don't turn it on.

An opt-in in Settings → About, off by default. Early bird updates are pre-release builds: you get new versions before everyone else, and they may have rough edges. They come from the same hosts as regular updates, are verified the same way, and still install only when you say so. Switch it off any time: you keep the build you have, and you rejoin the regular updates at the next regular release, because the app never installs an older version.