Foresight is a free app for Macs with Apple chips. It listens to a meeting in the background, on Zoom or Meet or around a table, and writes the notes from the few lines you type. Google calls it experimental, a showcase for its new open AI models, and it does not run on older Intel Macs. It is also not the first notetaker that keeps your audio at home: Talat did that in March. What is new is who is giving it away, and how much of the job now fits on the laptop.
What it does with your scribbles
Say you type "Q3 budget, hold hiring, Maria sends vendor quotes." The app has the full transcript, so it expands each line into a proper sentence with the detail from the conversation. You can also load PDFs, Word files, plain notes and web bookmarks before the meeting. When someone asks a question that those files answer, such as what the clinic paid its locum agency last year, the app shows the answer on screen.
That second part depends on a model that turns text, images and audio into numbers so that related things end up close together. It works like a filing clerk who has read everything you handed over. Asked about the locum agency, the clerk does not hunt for those exact words; the clerk brings the contract that is about them.
Why it fits on a laptop now
A notetaker does three jobs: it hears the meeting, finds what is relevant in your files, and writes it up. Cloud notetakers rent you all three. Foresight does all three on the machine, and the finding model is small enough to run on a phone in roughly half a gigabyte of memory. Once the work fits on the device you already own, the cost of one more meeting's notes is a little electricity, and nobody needs a per-person fee to cover servers.
For a team of 30 on Granola's business plan, that fee is $14 times 30 times 12, or about $5,040 a year. Foresight will not replace everything that money buys. Granola also has phone apps, and a Mac-only experiment does not. But a team of Mac users that only wants good notes of its own meetings can now get them for nothing.
What happens to the notetaker business
The models are released under a licence that lets any company use them, so notes will become a feature inside other products, the way Calendly added its own notetaker in August. A company that sells only transcription and a summary has little left to charge for. The ones that last will charge for what happens after the meeting: the follow-up email that writes itself, the customer record that updates, the team's shared memory of what was decided.
That is also a useful way to judge what you pay for. Notes are becoming cheap, and the workflow around them is not.
If your team has avoided notetakers because of where the audio goes, a local one is now worth trying on a Mac with an Apple chip, in a meeting that is not sensitive. Running on your own laptop does not change the rule that everyone in the room should know they are being recorded, so tell them first.