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EchoEcho

What Echo is

Echo records your meetings, transcribes them with Whisper and writes notes with a local language model, all on your own Mac. It is an open-source, self-hosted alternative to cloud notetakers such as Fireflies, Otter.ai and Fathom.

What Echo is

  • A product you run yourself. You build Echo from source and run it on your laptop. There is no Echo account, no Echo cloud and no subscription.
  • Local by design. The server binds only to your Mac’s loopback address. Audio, transcripts and notes are stored in an encrypted library on your disk. Speech recognition runs on your Mac; notes come from Ollama running on your Mac.
  • No bot in your call. A browser extension records the meeting tab you are already in (Google Meet, Zoom web, Microsoft Teams web). Nobody sees a “notetaker has joined” tile.
  • For one person. Echo is a single-user tool: your meetings, on your computer.

What Echo is not

  • Not a service. Nobody operates Echo for you, and the project never receives your recordings. The public website only hosts documentation.
  • Not a team product. There is no sharing, no multi-user workspace and no admin console.
  • Not a packaged app (yet). Echo runs from a source checkout. You need to be comfortable with Terminal.
  • Not for every platform. Echo targets Apple Silicon Macs and the Brave or Chrome browser.

How it fits together

  1. The browser extension captures the meeting tab’s audio, and optionally your microphone, and keeps it encrypted in the browser until Echo is reachable.
  2. The Echo server (Rust) stores everything in an encrypted SQLCipher library whose key lives in the macOS Keychain.
  3. The Echo web app, open at http://localhost:3000, transcribes with Whisper, groups speakers, and lets you review, edit and export.
  4. Ollama turns a transcript into notes, if you install it.

Next steps