Clearminutes is made by DevBytesUK, a small software studio founded by James Gibbard. We started Clearminutes because every meeting assistant we tried wanted to upload our conversations to someone else's servers. We thought there was a better way: one where the transcription and the AI both run on the machine in front of you.
James is an engineering leader, QA and cloud architect, and longtime IoT tinkerer. He builds Clearminutes end to end: the Rust audio pipeline, the local Whisper and LLM integration, and the desktop app. The goal is simple: meeting notes that are useful and private, without asking you to trust a cloud vendor with your conversations. Find out more about his work at jgibbard.me.uk.
Most meeting assistants work the same way: a bot joins your call, the audio is uploaded to a server, and a cloud model writes your summary. That means a third party holds a recording of everything said in your meeting, and you're asked to trust their retention policy, their security, and their training practices. For healthcare, legal, financial, and anyone who'd rather not hand their conversations to a vendor, that trade-off doesn't sit right. Clearminutes is the alternative: the same transcription and summarisation, running on your own Mac or Windows machine.
Clearminutes transcribes with Whisper running locally on your CPU or GPU. Summaries are generated on-device by default with a built-in model: no API key, no subscription required for the core workflow. Audio is captured directly from your microphone and system output, so no bot joins the call. Nothing is uploaded unless you explicitly choose a cloud LLM for a stronger summary, and even then only the transcript text is sent, never the audio. You can verify this yourself in the in-app network monitor during a meeting.
Download Clearminutes free: no credit card, no cloud uploads, no bot in the room.