You’re paying $10 a month for an AI notetaker that uploads every word of your meetings to someone else’s cloud. Google just made that look a little silly. Google AI Edge Foresight is a free Mac app that writes your meeting notes completely offline, and nothing you say ever leaves your laptop.
What Google AI Edge Foresight actually is
Google AI Edge Foresight is a Mac app Google launched this week to show off its new EmbeddingGemma 2 model. That’s a 740 million parameter model built on the Gemma 4 architecture, released under the Apache 2.0 license. Translation: it’s small, it’s open source, and it runs on your machine instead of in a data center.
The app listens during meetings, transcribes everything locally, and helps you take notes at the same time. You get a split-screen view. Your quick shorthand scribbles go on one side, and polished AI-written notes build up on the other. If that setup sounds familiar, it’s basically the same layout that made Granola popular, except this one doesn’t need an internet connection.
Here’s the part that surprised me. With quantization, the model needs around 567MB of RAM for the full multimodal version, and roughly 191MB for text-only weights, according to Google’s announcement. Your phone could run this. Google’s own demo runs it on a Pixel 11 Pro.
It also works beyond video calls. Google Meet, Zoom, and plain old in-person conversations all get captured, because the app listens to your Mac’s audio rather than joining the call as a bot.
How to set it up on your Mac
Setup takes about five minutes. Here’s the whole process:
- Go to the official Google AI Edge Foresight page and download the Mac app. It’s optimized for Apple Silicon, so M1 or newer is what you want.
- Install it like any other Mac app by dragging it into your Applications folder.
- Grant microphone and accessibility permissions when prompted. The app needs both to hear meetings across different apps.
- Join a meeting in Meet or Zoom, or just talk to someone in the room. The app captures the audio in the background.
- Scribble shorthand bullets for the stuff you care about. “Budget question”, “ask Sam about deadline”, whatever.
- Glance at the notes side. Your bullets get enriched into full, formatted notes instantly, built from the local transcript.
That’s genuinely all there is to it. No account juggling, no calendar bot asking to join your call, no upload waiting for the meeting to end.
The shorthand trick that makes it useful
Most AI notetakers record everything and hand you a wall of text afterward. Foresight works the other way around. You stay in control of what matters by jotting quick bullets while the app handles the heavy lifting.
So you write “pricing objection, follow up Tuesday” during a sales call. By the time the meeting ends, that fragment has become a proper paragraph in your notes, with the surrounding context from the transcript filled in. For anyone who’s ever scrolled through a 45-minute transcript hunting for one decision, this flow makes a lot more sense.
There’s also a Live Assistance mode. It listens along and can automatically surface answers to questions as they come up in the meeting. Ask something in the room, and the app checks your materials and gives you an answer on the spot.
Chat with your own files
This is the feature that pushes it past a simple notetaker. You can point Foresight at project folders, reference documents, and your calendar. It accepts PDFs, Google Docs, Microsoft Office files, plain text, Markdown, and even web bookmarks.
The result works like a mini knowledge base. Meanwhile, during a live meeting, the app connects what’s being said to your documents in real time. If a client mentions a clause from last quarter’s contract and you have that PDF in your project folder, the relevant answer shows up without you digging through Finder.
For example, I pointed mine at a folder of freelance invoices and a client brief, then asked what my payment terms were for a specific project. The answer came back in seconds, offline, on a plane-mode Mac. That’s the moment this stops being a demo and starts being a tool.
How it stacks up against the paid notetakers
The AI meeting notes market is crowded right now. Granola, Fathom, and a wave of others all want your monthly subscription. So where does Google AI Edge Foresight actually land against them?
| Google AI Edge Foresight | Granola | Fathom | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starting price | Free | Free plan, paid tiers | Free plan, paid tiers |
| Works fully offline | Yes | No | No |
| Where your audio goes | Stays on your Mac | Company’s cloud | Company’s cloud |
| In-person meetings | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Chat with your own documents | Yes, local files and Drive | Limited | Yes, cloud-based |
For privacy and price, Foresight wins outright. Nothing beats free, and nothing beats your audio never leaving the device. Granola still wins on polish and cross-platform support, and Fathom’s team features run deeper for companies that live in Zoom all day. But if your reasons for avoiding cloud notetakers were privacy or cost, those reasons just went away.
The catch
There are a few, and you should know them before you ditch your current tool.
Mac only, to start. Google optimized the app for Apple Silicon, so Windows and Linux users are out of luck for now. iPhone users too. If you need something local on Windows, we’ve covered Meetily, a free meeting transcription tool that runs locally, which fills a similar gap.
It might be a showcase more than a product. Google built this to demonstrate EmbeddingGemma 2, and its track record with side-project apps is rough. Remember, the company released an experimental dictation tool in April that never really escaped the lab. And TechCrunch’s coverage points out Google could still ship a bigger consumer version inside Gemini, which would say a lot about this app’s future.
Finally, the AI notes are only as good as your shorthand. The transcript catches everything, yet the polished notes lean on the bullets you bothered to write. Lazy bullets in, thin notes out.
Who should actually use this
Writers, consultants, students, and anyone in back-to-back meetings who hates that their conversations get uploaded to a server farm. If you take notes on a Mac and you’ve been putting off a Granola subscription because of the cloud thing, this is your app.
As a result, your current paid notetaker finally has real competition on the two things that matter: money and privacy. Cross-platform teams should stick with their existing tools for now, though.
Your next step
Download Google AI Edge Foresight from the official AI Edge page and run it through one real meeting this week. Scribble your usual shorthand and compare the output to whatever you use now. If the notes hold up, you just saved yourself the subscription, and your meetings stay yours.
Related reading: if the privacy angle here matters to you, see what happens when AI note-taking apps read your meetings, and our complete setup guide for Google Meet AI notes on in-person meetings.
