A free meeting recorder that sends nothing

What you get when it ends

A folder, %USERPROFILE%\.deixis\sessions\<timestamp>\, holding:

• transcript.md — the merged, readable transcript, with timestamps: [00:12:34] Me: …
• transcript.mic.jsonl and transcript.sys.jsonl — the timestamped lines as they were recognised, if you want to process them
• the WAV files, your microphone and the system output, one file per minute
• meta.json — devices, sample rates, the model used, the segment length, start and end

Every one of those is written with no key, no account and no network. A meeting recorded on a laptop with the wifi off produces exactly the same files as one recorded online.

Sessions are named from what was said in them, so a month of meetings reads as a list of subjects rather than thirty timestamps — and a name you type yourself is never overwritten by anything.

While a meeting runs, Deixis says so everywhere you can see it: the tray icon carries a red dot, its menu counts the elapsed time, and the Meetings item in the side rail shows a recording dot and the clock from whichever page of the app you are on.

What the transcript reads like

transcript.md is Markdown, so it opens in anything and pastes into anything. Each line carries the time it was said and which side said it:

[00:12:34] Me: Annual first. The monthly price exists so nobody feels trapped.
[00:12:41] Them: Then the annual has to be under fifty, or the comparison does the work against us.
[00:13:02] Me: Forty-nine, then. I will write it up.

That format is deliberately boring. It greps, it diffs, it pastes into a ticket, and it survives whatever tool you move to next — which a transcript inside somebody else's web application does not. The .jsonl files beside it carry the same lines with their exact timings, for anyone who wants to do something programmatic with them.

Three minutes of setup, once

The first launch shows one Download button for the speech models: 142 MB, fetched once, after which nothing about dictation or transcription touches the network again. Nothing else needs installing — no runtime, no redistributable, no codec pack.

Then check two things before your first real call. Put on headphones, so the far side does not arrive twice. And record thirty seconds of something with the chord, stop it, and open the session folder to see that both transcript.mic.jsonl and transcript.sys.jsonl have lines in them — if the second is empty, loopback is not available on that sound device and you will be recording your own side only. Finding that out on a Tuesday afternoon is much better than finding it out after the meeting you needed.

The one optional paid step

Notes. The summary, the decisions, the action items and the open questions are written by a language model, and that model is either on your machine or on somebody's server. So notes need either a local model you have set up, your own provider key, or Pro at $49 a year.

Notes are deliberately the last step and the most failure-tolerant one: with nothing configured the meeting still records, still transcribes, and still writes transcript.md. Regenerate notes retries later, on a session recorded weeks ago, once you have a model to answer.

Everything before that step — the recording, the on-device transcription, the merged transcript, the naming fallback, the files — is free, forever, with no account.

What it is honestly bad at

• Wear headphones if you can. Loopback captures what the speakers play, but your microphone hears them too, so on speakers the far side bleeds into your own side of the transcript. Echo cancellation is out of scope.
• Loopback is not always available. Exclusive-mode devices and some virtual sound cards cannot be captured; Deixis falls back to microphone-only, says so on screen, and records the fact in meta.json rather than failing the meeting.
• English. The shipped speech models are English, and a meeting in another language will record but not transcribe usefully.
• It does not join the call for you. There is no calendar integration and nothing that spots a meeting starting; you press the chord.
• No archive in the cloud. Sessions are folders on your disk. Backing them up is your filesystem's job, not a feature you are paying for.

What a seat costs, and what this does not

The arithmetic is the whole argument. A meeting-notes service is typically sold at somewhere between ten and thirty dollars per person per month, every month, whether or not the person had meetings that month — and the recording of every call is on their disk for as long as their retention policy says. For a team of ten that is a line item somebody has to defend each year.

Deixis records and transcribes for nothing, on hardware you already own, and the only thing you could pay for is the written notes at $49 a year for a person — free if you bring your own provider key. There is no seat count on the recording, because there is no server on the other end of it to count against.

That is also the answer to the question an IT department asks first. What leaves the machine during a meeting is nothing at all unless you have configured notes, in which case the transcript is what leaves, to the endpoint you configured, at the end. Never the audio, on any plan, under any setting.

Where the bot tools still win

The honest version, because a tool that pretends to have no downside is a tool nobody trusts. The meeting-notes services bring a searchable archive across a whole company, they integrate with calendars and CRMs, several of them handle many languages, and they work when the person recording is not at their computer. If those are what you are buying, buy those — and the individual comparisons are on the meetings pages. What they all have in common is that the conversation is uploaded to be transcribed. Deixis is the option where it is not.