Meeting notes without the bot, the cloud, or the subscription.
The meeting-notes market settled on one shape: a bot joins your call (or an app taps your audio), streams everything to a cloud, and charges $8–19 per month forever. It works. It's also the least private possible design for the most sensitive conversations you have. Selam takes the other path.
How Selam does it
Tap Take Notes during any call on your Mac — Zoom, Meet, WhatsApp, FaceTime, anything. She captures two channels at once: your microphone, and the call's own audio through macOS system-audio capture. That means both sides of the conversation, cleanly separated, with no bot joining the call — nothing for the other side to see, admit, or kick out. Transcription runs on-device with bundled Whisper models; the transcript never leaves your machine. While the meeting runs she stays quiet and just listens — say her name if you need her.
When you stop, she writes structured notes — summary, key points, decisions, action items with owners — and says the recap out loud. Consent is built in: she announces the start and stop of recording to everyone on the call, every time.
The part nobody else does: notes become knowledge
Every other tool files your transcript in a searchable archive and stops. Selam absorbs what she hears: the people, decisions, and facts from your meetings flow into her working knowledge, so next week you can ask "what did Sara say about the deal?" — or she can use it while drafting the follow-up email. Your meetings stop being an archive and start being context.
Side by side
| Selam | Otter / Fireflies / Fathom | Granola | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bot joins the call | Never | Usually (bot participant) | No (audio tap) |
| Transcription runs | On your Mac | Their cloud | Their cloud |
| Where transcripts live | Files on your Mac | Their servers | Their servers |
| Becomes assistant knowledge | Yes — she works with what she heard | No — searchable archive | Partially (notes app) |
| Can speak in the call | Yes — announces recording; participation optional | Otter's agent, enterprise-only | No |
| Consent announcements | Built in, spoken, every time | Varies by plan/admin | None (silent capture) |
| Price | Included in Selam — $99 once (founder) | $8–19/user/mo | $14–35/user/mo |
The honest limits
Speaker labels are two-channel today — "you" and "them" — not per-person diarization across a five-way call. Recall is keyword search, with semantic recall on the roadmap. And local Whisper on an M-series Mac is excellent but not magic on terrible audio. If you need per-speaker analytics across a 40-person sales org, buy Fireflies. If you want your own meetings captured privately by an assistant who then uses what she learned — that's Selam.
The short version: the cloud tools built meeting archives you rent. Selam turns meetings into private knowledge you own — captured on your Mac, spoken consent included, one price.
Related: what "local-first" actually means · Selam vs. OpenWorker · the security model