karl.
Private meeting notes for Mac, iPhone and Android. One tap to record. The transcript streams in live and a summary writes itself, entirely on your device. No bot in your call, no account, no limits. Your voice never reaches us.
Why Karl
- Unlimited everything, free. No monthly minutes, no per-meeting time caps, no import quotas. Transcription runs on your own chip, so there is nothing to meter.
- Nothing to upload. Recording, transcription, and summaries are all on-device. Losing internet can't even stop a recording.
- Hears the whole call. On the Mac, Karl captures system audio too. Remote participants land in the transcript even when you wear headphones, without a bot joining your meeting.
- Speaks your languages. English, Spanish, French, German and more. Karl tells Spanish from English on its own, live, and writes each summary in the meeting's own language.
- Pro syncs, privately. One small purchase adds sync between your iPhone and Mac through your own private iCloud. Invisible to us, like everything else.
Coming from another app? Here is Karl side by side with Otter.ai and with Granola. On a Mac, here is how to record a Zoom call without a bot.
Questions
- Does Karl upload my recordings?
- No. Recording, transcription and summaries all happen on your iPhone, Mac or Android phone. With Pro on iPhone and Mac, meetings sync through your own iCloud, which we can't see.
- Does it work offline?
- Yes. The first recording in a language downloads that language's speech model. After that, Karl needs no internet at all.
- Will a bot join my Zoom or Teams call?
- No. On the Mac, Karl records the call's audio directly, so remote people land in the transcript without anyone joining the meeting. Where the law asks for it, tell people you're recording.
- Is it really free?
- Yes. Recording and transcription have no monthly limit and no time cap. Pro is optional. It costs $1.99 a month, $14.99 a year, or $24.99 once, and adds sync between iPhone and Mac, speaker names, folders and Ask Karl.
- What do I need?
- An iPhone with iOS 26, a Mac with macOS 26, or an Android phone with Android 8 or later. On iPhone and Mac, automatic summaries use Apple Intelligence, so they need a device that supports it. On Android they use Gemini Nano where the phone has it, or a model downloaded once.
- Which languages does it understand?
- English, Spanish, French, German and more. Karl tells Spanish from English on its own and writes each summary in the meeting's language.
Speaker identification uses the pyannote segmentation and WeSpeaker voice models (CC BY 4.0), running on-device via the FluidAudio engine (Apache 2.0).