Google Just Shipped an Offline Meeting Notetaker. Here Is What Foresight Means

On 6 October 2026, Google published a developer blog post about EmbeddingGemma 2, its new small embedding model. It also introduced a demo app called Foresight, and that app is the most interesting thing to happen to on-device meeting AI this year.

Foresight is, in Google’s own words, an “experimental app” that captures “your system audio and microphone,” “works out-of-the-box with any meeting platform, even completely offline,” and is powered by “EmbeddingGemma 2 and Gemma 4 models” with “no cloud subscription costs.” It fills out your shorthand notes from the live transcript, the way Granola does, and it can search a local library of your own files for context during the call.

TechCrunch’s write-up two days later added the practical details: Foresight is a Mac app optimised for Apple Silicon, uses a 740-million-parameter version of EmbeddingGemma 2, and borrows Granola’s layout closely enough that TechCrunch called it a “local-first Granola competitor.”

Why this matters

For two years, the standard answer to “why does my notetaker need the cloud?” was that good transcription and good summaries need big models on big servers. Vendors said it, and most buyers accepted it.

Foresight is Google, the company with arguably the largest cloud AI business in the world, shipping a meeting notetaker whose headline feature is that it does not need one. That does not prove local models are as good as cloud models for every task. It does settle the narrower question that matters for this category: a laptop can now transcribe a meeting and write useful notes from it without sending audio anywhere.

We have argued since our 2025 piece on the rise of on-device meeting AI that this was where the category was heading. The argument is about the copy. A vendor that never receives your audio cannot leak it, train on it, hand it over under subpoena, or be sued as a third-party eavesdropper for keeping it. Encryption protects a copy. On-device processing means the copy is never made.

What Foresight is not, yet

Read Google’s wording carefully, because it is careful.

It is an experiment. Google calls it one, and TechCrunch notes that Google’s earlier experimental offline dictation app never became a mainstream product. Experimental apps can change, stall, or disappear. That is a reason not to build a team workflow on it today.

It is Mac only. It is built for Apple Silicon Macs. No Windows, no iPhone, no Android, so nothing for the in-person meeting where the only device in the room is a phone.

There is no stated consent feature. Like every bot-free tool, Foresight captures system audio silently. Nothing in Google’s announcement mentions a recording notice, a disclosure prompt, or guidance for all-party-consent states. That is not unusual. It is still the open legal question for the whole bot-free category, and the Granola class action is testing it now.

Nobody has audited it. “Works completely offline” is a claim we can test, and we will. Until then it is Google’s description. Our airplane test is simple: turn off the network, record a meeting, and see whether you still get a transcript and a summary.

How it compares with the on-device tools we already rank

Foresight joins a short list. Among the 28 tools in our rankings, only two pass the airplane test outright:

• MacWhisper runs entirely on the Mac with no account. It transcribes well and detects meetings automatically, but its AI summaries stay offline only if you install and configure a local model yourself, and it has no cross-meeting memory or team features.
• Hedy can run its full pipeline (transcription, summaries, detailed notes, chat, and live coaching) on-device on supported hardware. That covers Apple Silicon Macs, capable Windows GPUs, recent iPhones and iPads, and, since September 2026, Android phones with a supported GPU and about 8 GB of memory. It is a shipping product with SOC 2 Type I, HIPAA BAAs, and contracts that bar its AI providers from training on anything that does touch its cloud.

Foresight sits between them: more meeting-aware than MacWhisper, much narrower than Hedy, and not yet a product. Its file-search feature is a genuinely good idea. Bringing your own documents into the live meeting context is something most cloud tools still do badly.

Several popular tools describe themselves as “on-device” because the audio capture happens on your computer, while transcription and summaries still run on their servers. Foresight’s arrival makes that distinction easier to explain: if Google can do the whole thing locally on a Mac, ask any vendor using the word why they cannot.

What to do with this

If you are on a Mac and curious, try Foresight on a meeting where you would not mind losing the notes. Run the airplane test. Tell the other participants you are recording, because the app will not.

If you need something you can deploy to a team today, across Windows and phones as well as Macs, with compliance paperwork behind it, Foresight is not that yet. Our privacy rankings and the new fact sheet, which lists where every tool we track actually processes audio, are the place to start.

We will review Foresight properly if Google turns it into a product. In the meantime, the largest cloud company in the world has just agreed that meeting audio does not need to leave the device.