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Google ships Foresight, a free meeting note-taker that never sends audio to the cloud

· by Pondero Newsdesk

The short version

Google released AI Edge Foresight this week, a free macOS app that transcribes and summarizes meetings entirely on-device using its EmbeddingGemma 2 model.

Google ships Foresight, a free meeting note-taker that never sends audio to the cloud

Every popular AI meeting assistant, Granola included, routes a recording through a server somewhere. Google's new app skips that step entirely: Google AI Edge Foresight transcribes and summarizes meetings on a Mac with no network call at all, as first reported by TechCrunch on October 8, 2026, and confirmed on Google's own Foresight page.

What shipped

Foresight is a free, experimental macOS app built on Google's EmbeddingGemma 2 model, the 740-million-parameter on-device model Google released October 6, per TechCrunch's reporting. The interface splits the screen between a user's own shorthand notes and an AI-generated transcript, the same layout Granola popularized, and Google says it turns those shorthand bullets into "polished notes" once the meeting ends. A built-in assistant, powered by Gemma 4 according to TechCrunch, answers questions about what was discussed, and users can upload PDFs, Google Docs, Office files, and web bookmarks to build a reference library the assistant can pull from. Google told The Verge that meeting audio, notes, and uploaded files "never leave your computer," and the app currently requires a Mac with Apple Silicon.

A free tool removes the cloud-privacy tradeoff, but only on one platform

For anyone who has avoided Granola or Wispr Flow because a client call or board meeting can't legally or contractually leave company hardware, Foresight removes that excuse without charging a subscription. That matters most for legal, healthcare, and enterprise-sales teams whose meetings carry confidentiality terms that a cloud transcription vendor's data-processing agreement doesn't always satisfy cleanly. Reach is the limit: Foresight only runs on Apple Silicon Macs today, so anyone on Windows, an Intel Mac, or a phone gets nothing. Google has also shipped an on-device tool before and let it stay niche. Its April 2026 offline dictation app for iOS never reached mainstream adoption, per TechCrunch, and Foresight carries the same "experimental" label, so teams piloting it should treat it as unsupported rather than a committed product line.

What to watch next

TechCrunch reported that Google could still ship a cloud-connected consumer version through its Gemini apps, which would reintroduce the tradeoff this release avoids. Whether Foresight reaches Windows or mobile, and whether it survives past the experimental stage the way its April dictation app did not, are the open questions.

Sources