Oats is an AI meeting note-taking tool that is completely open, local, and free. Designed to not get in the way of your meetings, no bots, no subscription needed when running locally with on-device LLM. Available on both macOS and Windows. Enhanced transcription, multi-language support, speaker recognition, assessment, coaching, auto-tracking follow ups and more features via ariso.ai cloud backend.
We think AI meeting notes have become useful enough to be a basic utility. And basic utilities should be free, open source, and private by default.
That’s why we built Oats 🥣 -- a free, open-source AI meeting note taker for Mac & Windows.
Why Oats?
Most AI meeting tools require a bot to join your calls, send your conversations to the cloud, lock useful features behind a subscription, or use your data in ways that aren’t always obvious.
We wanted a different option.
Oats runs locally on your computer. It can record your meetings without a bot joining the call, then transcribe and summarize the conversation on-device, using local AI models.
Your recordings stay local. And because Oats is open source, you can use it, audit it, modify it, or build on top of it.
No meeting bot. No model training on your data. No data lock-in.
What you can do with Oats:
Record meetings without inviting a bot
Transcribe and summarize locally
Keep recordings on your own computer
Run with on-device LLMs
Inspect and modify the source code
Use it completely free
For those who want more, Oats can also connect to the Ariso cloud backend for enhanced transcription, multi-language support, speaker recognition, assessments, coaching, automatic follow-up tracking, and more.
Even when you use our cloud features, we will never use your meeting data to train our models, including on the free plan.
Oats is also our first step toward open-sourcing more of what we build at Ariso.
So we’d love the Product Hunt community to put it through its paces. Tell us what’s missing. Break something. Open an issue. Build something weird on top of it. Or contribute directly. 🥣
Duuuuuuude!!! Congrats on the launch!!! 🚀 I’m gonna try it out! I hate all of the current options that exist today. So annoying!!!
The no bot approach is probably my favorite part here. Keeping everything local while still getting useful meeting notes is a really nice balance. Open source makes this even more interesting. Congrats on the launch team!
welldone Oats team, i am impressed by your product, my qustion is does it record all the screen of just the notes?
left a review above - the no-bot, fully local angle is what stands out here. curious how the diarization/speaker recognition holds up locally when the model is small enough to actually run on a laptop, that's usually where local AI notetakers fall behind cloud ones.
congrats on the launch, its a great product.
quick question what is the most unique feature of Oats which make it different from other products
We built Oats because we believe people should have more control over their data. Privacy shouldn’t be something you trade away for convenience, and useful software shouldn’t require trusting a black box.
Oats is open source because we value FOSS: people should be able to inspect it, improve it, run it themselves, and keep ownership of their work. If you care about private, transparent tools, we’d love for you to check it out.
Really curious about the speaker recognition part. does that work locally too or does it require the Ariso backend?
okay, i really like this idea. not having a bot pop into every meeting is already a big win for me 😄
this feels like the kind of AI utility that should just be available to everyone.
Congrats @maxheckel how much CPU/RAM does it typically use while recording? curious how lightweight it is on older laptops.
Is there a way to export the notes or transcript? would be nice to move them into Notion or another workspace.
This solves one of my biggest issues with meeting tools. how accurate is the local transcription compared to cloud based tools?
Can Oats pick up audio from headphones as well as the laptop speakers? that’s always a tricky part with meeting apps.
Can i edit the generated notes after a meeting? would be handy for cleaning things up before sharing.
About Oats on Product Hunt
“Free, open-source, and on device meeting notetaker”
Oats launched on Product Hunt on September 14th, 2026 and earned 192 upvotes and 67 comments, placing #5 on the daily leaderboard. Oats is an AI meeting note-taking tool that is completely open, local, and free. Designed to not get in the way of your meetings, no bots, no subscription needed when running locally with on-device LLM. Available on both macOS and Windows. Enhanced transcription, multi-language support, speaker recognition, assessment, coaching, auto-tracking follow ups and more features via ariso.ai cloud backend.
Oats was featured in Open Source (68.8k followers), Meetings (6.5k followers), Artificial Intelligence (478.4k followers) and GitHub (41.4k followers) on Product Hunt. Together, these topics include over 168.8k products, making this a competitive space to launch in.
Who hunted Oats?
Oats was hunted by Erkang Zheng. A “hunter” on Product Hunt is the community member who submits a product to the platform — uploading the images, the link, and tagging the makers behind it. Hunters typically write the first comment explaining why a product is worth attention, and their followers are notified the moment they post. Around 79% of featured launches on Product Hunt are self-hunted by their makers, but a well-known hunter still acts as a signal of quality to the rest of the community. See the full all-time top hunters leaderboard to discover who is shaping the Product Hunt ecosystem.
Want to see how Oats stacked up against nearby launches in real time? Check out the live launch dashboard for upvote speed charts, proximity comparisons, and more analytics.
Erkang Zheng
Hey Product Hunt! 👋
We think AI meeting notes have become useful enough to be a basic utility. And basic utilities should be free, open source, and private by default.
That’s why we built Oats 🥣 -- a free, open-source AI meeting note taker for Mac & Windows.
Why Oats?
Most AI meeting tools require a bot to join your calls, send your conversations to the cloud, lock useful features behind a subscription, or use your data in ways that aren’t always obvious.
We wanted a different option.
Oats runs locally on your computer. It can record your meetings without a bot joining the call, then transcribe and summarize the conversation on-device, using local AI models.
Your recordings stay local. And because Oats is open source, you can use it, audit it, modify it, or build on top of it.
No meeting bot. No model training on your data. No data lock-in.
What you can do with Oats:
Record meetings without inviting a bot
Transcribe and summarize locally
Keep recordings on your own computer
Run with on-device LLMs
Inspect and modify the source code
Use it completely free
For those who want more, Oats can also connect to the Ariso cloud backend for enhanced transcription, multi-language support, speaker recognition, assessments, coaching, automatic follow-up tracking, and more.
Even when you use our cloud features, we will never use your meeting data to train our models, including on the free plan.
Oats is also our first step toward open-sourcing more of what we build at Ariso.
So we’d love the Product Hunt community to put it through its paces. Tell us what’s missing. Break something. Open an issue. Build something weird on top of it. Or contribute directly. 🥣
We’ll be here all day answering questions.
— The Ariso Team