[OS] I built Steno to protect your most sensitive conversations. AI notetaker & notepad. 1200+ GitHub stars, 1000s of downloads
Hey folks, I'm the lead developer of steno and wanted to share our latest update. Steno is a privacy first AI notepad & notetaker for your most sensitive conversations. Problem: Most AI note taking solutions have bots joining your calls, send your data to a third party, working only with one provider (Zoom AI for Zoom) and have usage limits/charge $$ for their service. If you are in government, healthcare, finance or legal or care about your sensitive conversations and don't want your data shipping to a 3rd party provider like Granola or Otter to train on, then Steno is the tool for you. We care deeply about privacy. Comparison: We don't have many direct competitors. In terms of beautiful UX and ability take notes, we have already matched Granola (another note taking app) but also offer an open source codebase, free usage, ability to run offline or in your own network and complete privacy of data. We are planning on releasing more features that widens the gap like workflows. Pricing: Free without usage limits. Github: https://github.com/ruzin/stenoai Website- https://stenoai.co
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The offline mode is the interesting part for the regulated crowd you're after. Local transcription (Whisper etc.) is well-trodden, but summarization is where privacy tools usually fall back to a cloud model. What actually generates the notes when you run fully offline, and how big a model does that need?
As a granola user the UI looks familiar. Gonna give it a try soon. Good luck :)
Honestly, I think we are 80% as good now. And we have granola users who switch regularly! And we charge $0
I wish I had the brain to build something like this. The offline + local transcription part especially — that's the hard bit and you just did it.
Honestly it’s open source, we have some great contributors. Also we’ve been working steadily for a year - v0.0.1 was woeful but proved the idea Feel free to join and contribute! Would love to have you
AI notetaking is one of the most crowded spaces, if not the most crowded. But taking the right niche and doubling down on it is kind of a good move. As for me personally, I'm the kind of person who's expected to raise questions, though I'm not usually the first person to speak in the conversation. Is Steno able to do that, or is that too big of a feature for such a specific use case? The workflow I want is to have a list of questions I can ask during the discussion whenever a key player mentions something and Steno help me with that. It pokes me by helping phrase question or mention what they said and then ask.
Hey we are thinking of releasing pre-meeting briefings initially and then we can open up to other workflows. Is that what you’re looking for? Because we are open source, honestly if you join our discord, within reason, we can build anything!
The UI is actually really good and super simple! Would love to see something similiar for a basic note taker like Joplin.
Would you want a note taking feature? We already have note taking but considering offering a more pure option
This looks great, i'll download and try it out
Thanks we’d love that and you can join our discord and ask for features you want! We are very responsive
The offline and own-network options are the part that makes this interesting. “Privacy first” usually becomes vague once the actual model call starts, so I would make the data path very explicit: what stays on the Mac, what can go to a configured provider, and whether anything is retained after processing. For sensitive conversations, that matters more than whether the model is slightly better. A clear provider boundary and a visible local mode would probably make this much easier to trust.
Hey yes you can select between the modes depending on how sensitive your conversation. No audio ever leaves your device in any mode - this is really important for high security sectors!
Can you add a homebrew option to install?
we always get this request, so its on our plate, just on a side quest with windows support! for now just hit the one click install and try it out, we will release brew soon
Whats the license? Mit or gpl just wondering before looking the repo
MIT
How accurate is the local model would you say? Is it worth perhaps BYOK to hook up to a smarter model in the cloud? Have you thought about using the Apple Intelligence smarter models for this remote? Asking because small models can drop important things or misunderstand etc...and it feels like thats kinda important to keep details accurate you know?
We already have BYOK and remote network options. Small models are getting better every year, when we started, we used llama and it wasn’t great, Gemma4 is a huge improvement. As models get denser, I believe local is the future. But yeah many of our users use their own cloud keys and even enterprises. Key for everyone is control of their data
The .app size is 1.35 GB so I thought hmm cool the AI models are already in it but then it made me download another 572 MB for transcription model, then another 2 GB for summarization engine. I guess my question is what's in that 1.35 GB? If I'm downloading the models by myself then the app size should be around 300-400 mb. I couldn't opened the app yet because it made me waited too long and I'm not sure it's still downloading the Parakeet model. Maybe one feedback I could give is that since you enabled cloud API for summarization engine you can do the same for transcription model so if someone has their API keys they could start right away. Also some users like me they already have Ollama and LM Studio on their computers so it would be cool to use local models as well, not sure you already support it because I couldn't pass the onboarding screen. Also you need to show a % when download something since those are large files but anyway the app looks great so congrats.
Hey that’s in progress - or atleast we are debating allowing cloud transcription but this goes against us wanting to keep it private secure the audio atleast. But yeh we have a PR open for it already. Yes the app download is 400mb but grows to 1.3 gb once installed, we’ve got a PR in process to cut the size down - mainly our old Intel support. What do you mean you couldn’t open the app, if you installed parakeet it should be fine? You can hit us up on discord btw and we can support
This looks fantastic - will download and try it out!
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Man yeah definitely! Love open source!
If you’d like to contribute our project, we’d really welcome it! We are growing to quite a big community now so will be great to have more OSS contributors