A recorded meeting is one of the most sensitive files you own. It has names, voices, half-formed plans, salary numbers, a customer complaining about a competitor, a colleague thinking out loud. The transcript makes all of it searchable, which is the point, and also the risk.
The common shape of a meeting tool today is a bot that joins the call, uploads the audio, transcribes it in a data centre and keeps the result in a workspace you sign into. That shape is convenient. It also means the only copy of your meeting history lives on a server you do not control, under a subscription you have to keep paying, and under terms that can change.
unottr takes the other shape. Recordings sit in a folder on your disk. Transcription and speaker separation run on your CPU or GPU. Search is a local SQLite index. There is no account because there is nothing to sign into.
What “local” actually means here
It is easy to say “private” on a landing page, so here is the specific claim. There is no network call in the transcription or diarization path. The app downloads model weights on first use and caches them, and after that a recording can go from file to speaker-labelled transcript with the network cable unplugged.
The exceptions are the optional AI features: overviews and Ask. Nothing happens there until you add a connection and start a request. Consent is stored per connection, so agreeing to use a model server on your own laptop is a separate decision from agreeing to use a hosted API. Before the first overview call, unottr shows the exact text it is about to send. Audio, video and frames are never sent anywhere.
Why ownership matters more than it sounds
Three things change when the files are yours.
You can leave. Transcripts export as plain text, JSON, SRT or VTT. Markdown notes can mirror to a folder you choose. If unottr disappeared tomorrow, your meeting history would still be readable in any editor.
Nobody else’s retention policy applies. You decide what to keep. Deleting a recording’s saved data removes its transcript, summary, tasks and bookmarks from the library, and the app tells you which Ask conversations go with it.
Your consent obligations stay simple. If you record interviews, client calls or anything under an agreement, “the audio never left my machine” is a sentence you can actually say.
What you give up
Local processing is not free. A supported GPU changes the wait from minutes to seconds; on CPU alone, a large model can run slower than realtime, so unottr picks a smaller default there. There is no mobile app, no bot that joins calls for you, and no shared team workspace. If you need a transcript to appear in a colleague’s inbox before the meeting ends, a hosted service is a better fit, and our comparison page says so.
For everyone whose meetings are worth more than the convenience of uploading them, a folder on your own disk is still the right place for them to live.
