I run most of my days inside Teams and Zoom, and for the longest time the notes after a meeting lived in a chat window. Someone pastes a block of text, it scrolls away, and by Friday it's gone. Nobody goes back to re-read a chat bubble. It's just not how people work.
So one of the things I actually care about with the meeting recorder I built is what comes out the other end. Not the transcript. The minutes. And not as yet another screen inside another app, but as files I can drop somewhere real.
Here's the pipeline. It records my mic and system audio, transcribes locally with faster-whisper, then a local model in LM Studio does the actual writing. The output is a proper structure: a summary, the key decisions, action items with owners and dates where anyone actually said them, and open questions. That last bit is the one that surprised me the most, honestly. Real minutes have a dangling-questions section, and getting it automatically instead of having to chase people afterward is genuinely useful.
But the part that sells it for me is the export. The tool writes Markdown, plain text, or PDF. I push the Markdown into the project repo next to the tickets those meetings generated. I PDF the ones with clients and file them. Plain text for anything quick.
There's a subtle thing there worth saying out loud. When minutes become a file, they become a thing you can diff. I can look at what we said we'd do in last week's meeting and check off the action items in this week's. That follow-up loop is where meetings actually pay rent, and it collapses when the notes are trapped in a scrolling chat thread that nobody treats as a document.
On the practical side, it's not demanding. Windows 10 or 11, Python 3.10 or newer, and LM Studio with any small model loaded. It runs on CPU fine -- a GPU only speeds up the transcription. I already had LM Studio running for other stuff, so the marginal cost of this was basically nothing. System audio comes in through a WASAPI loopback, which is how it catches Teams and Zoom call audio instead of only the microphone.
Everything stays on the machine. No cloud, no account, no subscription, nothing uploaded. If minute-taking is your job or you record a lot, a local tool is the only version of this that doesn't hand the content of every meeting to some vendor.
One honest warning, because I'd rather say it than not: recording meetings can be regulated where you work. Check your workplace rules and get consent from the people in the room before you hit record. It's worth doing right.
Anyway, if your minutes are currently buried in a chat thread, the whole thing -- recorder, transcription, minutes, export -- runs locally in one tool, and it's a one-time $9 at https://symshah.gumroad.com/l/xgoypx. Same idea I've been running here, and the files on my disk are proof it keeps working.
