Stop giving away your data for free after meetings

1. “AI in the room” means a copy of your meeting in the cloud

Most cloud‑based notetakers work the same way:

Record & upload – the app (or its meeting‑bot) streams audio/video to the vendor’s servers.
Process & store – speech‑to‑text and large‑language‑model (LLM) summarization happens in the vendor’s cloud. The raw recording and the transcript usually stay there.
Reuse & share – vendors may train models on “de‑identified” data, pass content to third‑party processors, or keep it indefinitely for “service improvement.”

Even if data is encrypted in transit, once it rests on someone else’s servers you inherit every one of their risks—breaches, subpoenas, jurisdictional conflicts, and policy changes you can’t control.

2. Cloud‑AI risks in the real world

Risk	What it looks like in practice
Model training on your words	Otter.ai explicitly says it trains its speech models on your de‑identified recordings and transcripts.
Indefinite retention	Fathom retains meeting recordings “until you delete them,” i.e., forever by default.
Third‑party exposure	Fireflies routes content through external STT & LLM vendors (they say those vendors have “zero‑day retention,” but it’s still outside your perimeter).
Consent & compliance failures	UMass banned Otter.ai after finding it violated the state’s all‑party consent law.
Accidental leaks	An Otter transcription glitch in 2024 shared a confidential post‑meeting chat with unintended recipients.

For teams in finance, healthcare, legal, or government, any one of these can break HIPAA, GDPR, FINRA, or internal NDA requirements.

3. Competitor snapshot

Otter.ai – Trains models on user data; allows staff access with consent; stores content on U.S. servers.
Fireflies.ai – Claims “no training,” but still funnels calls through cloud vendors and integrates with CRMs, increasing the blast radius.
Fathom – Keeps recordings indefinitely; shares device/usage metadata with partners, which can create traceable patterns.
Granola – Doesn’t store raw audio, but does store transcripts on its servers for sharing.

All four products ultimately rely on a cloud repository you don’t control.

4. Hyprnote’s local‑first guarantee

On‑device speech‑to‑text – Hyprnote ships with Whisper.cpp, so your audio is transcribed on your Mac.
On‑device summarization – The LLM that cleans up your notes also runs locally, never leaving the machine.
No bots, no streaming – Hyprnote sits in the menubar and listens only on your machine—no meeting invites, no hidden guests.
Full user control – Delete a note, and the data is gone. Unplug from the internet, and everything still works.
Open‑sourced core – Anyone can audit the code to verify that we’re not phoning home.

Result: your compliance officer can sleep at night, and your users keep the convenience of AI without surrendering the contents of every call.

5. Why local‑first matters for strict‑compliance teams

Regulatory alignment – Keeping PHI or customer PII off external servers avoids HIPAA Business Associate headaches and EU data‑transfer clauses.
Breach surface reduced – Attackers would need physical access to the user’s machine to get the raw audio.
Jurisdiction clarity – Your data lives under the same legal regime as the device it’s stored on—no surprise subpoenas from another country.
True opt‑in sharing – You decide if and when to sync or share; Hyprnote never assumes consent.

6. Take back control of your meetings

Cloud notetakers have made life easier—but at the price of handing your most candid conversations to someone else’s servers. Hyprnote proves you can have AI convenience and privacy.

Ready to keep your notes where they belong? Download Hyprnote and try local‑first note‑taking today.

Try Hyprnote for free forever, safely

John Jeong @computeless