Google's free Foresight app takes meeting notes fully offline on a Mac. Useful for privacy, but your CRM still needs the follow up

A meeting note-taker where the audio never leaves the laptop is good news for privacy sensitive clients, and a new gap for anyone who relies on notes landing in the CRM.

What happened

Google released Google AI Edge Foresight, an experimental and free Mac app that transcribes meetings and audio files entirely offline. TechCrunch reports it uses the on-device EmbeddingGemma 2 model with 740 million parameters and a Gemma 4 powered assistant, and that it is optimized for Apple Silicon.

Like Granola, it has a split view: you jot shorthand notes and the app turns them into polished notes from the transcript. You can view the transcript, ask the assistant questions, and build a knowledge base from PDFs, Google Docs, Office files, plain text, Markdown and web bookmarks. If a point from that knowledge base comes up in a meeting, it can answer in real time. Google says files, meeting audio and notes "never leave your computer," per The Verge.

TechCrunch notes the space is crowded: Wispr and Calendly launched note-takers recently, and Superhuman acquired Fathom last month.

My take

For clients in legal, health or finance, the hardest part of adopting an AI note-taker is often the question "where does the recording go?" A tool that keeps everything local removes one vendor from that conversation.

But local also means nothing flows anywhere by itself. In most sales and service teams, the value of call notes is what happens after: the deal stage update, the next step task, the follow up email. A note sitting in a desktop app does none of that.

How I would think about it:

1. Keep raw audio and full transcripts local when the client requires it.
2. Push only a structured summary to the CRM: outcome, next step, date, owner.
3. Put a human approval step before anything updates a deal or emails a client.
4. Treat Foresight as an experiment. Google calls it experimental, so do not build a team process that depends on it yet.

The capture tool will keep changing. The handoff from meeting to CRM is the part worth designing well.