Client meeting notes for consultants, kept on your own Mac

Consulting is paid-for listening. Discovery workshops, stakeholder interviews, steering committees, the call where the client finally explains what is really going on. The notes from those meetings are the raw material for everything you deliver, and writing them up takes hours that could be billed elsewhere.

An AI note taker can do much of that writing. The catch is where the meeting goes afterwards. This page covers what to check in your client agreements before you use one, and how Hearkeeper, a Mac app that is not released yet, is built to keep client meetings on your own computer.

What your client agreement probably says

Most consulting work starts with paperwork, and that paperwork usually covers confidential information. Before recording a client meeting with any tool, read what you signed:

• The NDA or confidentiality clause. It often says who you may share the client’s information with, sometimes only named staff or subcontractors, and on what terms. A cloud note taker that transcribes and stores the call is another company holding it.
• The data processing terms. If the meeting includes personal data about the client’s staff or customers, you may be handling it on the client’s behalf.
• Rules on AI tools. Some client contracts and security questionnaires ask directly whether you use AI services on their information, and which ones.
• Retention and return of information. Many agreements ask you to return or destroy confidential material at the end of an engagement. That is easier when you know every place a copy exists.

In the EU and EEA, data protection law can make this concrete. When you process personal data on a client’s behalf, the GDPR says a processor “shall not engage another processor without prior specific or general written authorisation of the controller” (GDPR, Article 28(2), read on 30 September 2026). A cloud transcription service that receives the recording can be such a processor.

Whether that applies to a given engagement depends on the facts and on the jurisdiction. These points are general, not legal advice. Check your own contracts, and ask the client when in doubt.

How Hearkeeper keeps client meetings on your Mac

Hearkeeper is built so that the whole pipeline runs on your own computer.

Recording without a bot. It records your microphone and your computer’s audio directly on the Mac. No bot joins the call, and the client does not install anything. It works with Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Slack huddles, Webex and FaceTime, and for workshops in a room. That matters when you join a meeting on the client’s own platform, where an outside bot may not be welcome or allowed.

Transcription on the device. Speech is transcribed on your Mac with whisper.cpp, accelerated by Metal. Live captions run about 2–4 seconds behind the speaker, and after you stop, a final pass with Whisper large-v3 turbo replaces them and separates the speakers.

Notes from a local model. A language model on your Mac writes the summary, the decisions and the to-dos, with who and when. No API key is needed.

Nothing uploaded by default. Nothing leaves your Mac unless you connect a team server or your own API key. With neither connected, the recording, transcript and notes stay on your disk, and it all works offline, including on a client site where you are on the guest network or none at all.

That gives you a short, checkable answer when a client asks where their meeting went: onto your Mac, and nowhere else.

Tell the client you are recording

Keeping a recording private is not the same as having permission to make it. Recording laws differ by country and state, some require everyone’s agreement, and clients reasonably expect to be asked. The guide on recording meetings with consent covers the main rules.

Hearkeeper is built so the question is always asked:

• A consent step before every recording. Read a short notice aloud, post it in the meeting chat, or both.
• A consent receipt is saved with the recording, so you can show later how people were told.
• A recording pill that is always visible, including in screen shares, and cannot be hidden.

A simple habit works well: mention in the kick-off that you record meetings for your own notes, that the recordings stay on your computer, and that anyone can ask you to stop. Some clients will say no for certain meetings. Respect it, and take notes by hand.

From meeting to deliverable

Every line links to its moment. Summaries and to-dos point to the second they were said, so you can check a point before it goes into a report. Click a line and the recording plays from there.

Search across an engagement. Full-text and semantic search run across all your recordings, stored in one SQLite file on your disk. Finding every time a stakeholder raised a risk is a search.

Ask across meetings. Ask a question across your meetings and each part of the answer points to its moment in the recording. You can also ask during a call with Command-Return.

Export to Markdown. Notes export to Markdown, plain text that pastes into a report draft, a client wiki or your own knowledge base. Nothing is kept in a proprietary format.

Retention at the end of an engagement

Because the files are yours, retention follows your agreement rather than a vendor’s policy.

• Audio and notes are ordinary files on your disk. Your backup and encryption practices apply to them like any other client document.
• Deleting is simple. If you never connected a server, deleting a meeting on your Mac leaves no cloud copy behind.
• Keep the notes, drop the audio if the agreement or the client prefers it. That is your call.

A local tool also puts the protection on you: use disk encryption and a strong password, and include the recordings in your backups only in places your agreements allow.

Client work in more than one language

Transcription covers 99 languages. Icelandic is first-class, and meetings that mix Icelandic and English are detected automatically, which helps with international clients and teams. See Icelandic transcription.

What Hearkeeper is not

• Not a certified system. Hearkeeper has no compliance certification of any kind.
• Not a client portal or project tool. It records, transcribes and writes notes; the deliverables live where they always have.
• Not a substitute for reading the transcript. A local model is smaller than the largest cloud models, which is why every line links to its moment.

When is it available?

Hearkeeper is coming to the Mac first (macOS 14.2 or later, Apple silicon and Intel), with other platforms later. The price has not been announced. It is made in Reykjavík by Drangalia ehf.

If you want client meeting notes that stay on your own computer, join the waitlist and we will email you when there is a build for you.