Government, defence & law enforcement

The record stays
in the room.

AI meeting notes for conversations that can’t be handed to a vendor. Run it on the device, or on infrastructure you control. No meeting bot. Open source.

Request a briefing Explore the platform

01 On your device02 On your infrastructure03 Open & inspectable

Trusted by teams at

01 / The app

Try it on your device

Less note-taking.
More situational clarity.

From the first word to the next decision. One private workflow for recording, understanding and returning to the conversations that matter.

Steno Local mode

Operations / Meeting notes

Operational readiness review

Thursday, 09:30 Private workspace

Capturing on this device00:14:32

Microphone System audio

Your meeting. No extra participant.

Capture on-deviceContent stays here

Illustrative product walkthrough Explore the four stages

Meeting bots.

Capture the room or call directly.

Languages.

With Whisper transcription.

MIT

Open source.

Your team can inspect every line.

02 / Where it’s used

A private record. A shared purpose.

Built for the conversations
that carry consequence.

When information is sensitive, the tools in the room matter. Give your teams useful AI without handing over their conversations.

People outside a lit office building at dusk

01 / Government

Government

For the public interest.Within your perimeter.

Policy discussions, ministerial briefings and committee meetings. Keep the record where it belongs, with the people responsible for it.

Policy · Briefings · Public administration

Personnel reviewing documents around a planning table

02 / Defence

Defence

Clarity in the room.Continuity in the field.

Planning sessions, programme reviews and debriefs. Capture decisions on your own hardware, even when a connection isn’t an option.

Planning · Reviews · Debriefs

03 / Law enforcement

Law enforcement

Accountable records.Inside the force.

Investigation reviews, command meetings and witness contact notes. A transcript behind every summary, kept under your own retention rules.

Reviews · Command · Safeguarding

03 / Where it runs

One pipeline. Three boundaries.

Your device, or your
infrastructure. Never ours.

Choose where the AI runs to match the sensitivity of the conversation. StenoAI operates no server that receives your meeting content, in any mode.

On the device

Capture, transcription, summaries and questions all run on the laptop. After setup it works offline and on air-gapped networks.

Local mode · Air-gap ready

On your infrastructure

Point summaries at a model server on your own network, such as Ollama or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint you host. Transcription stays on the device unless you also point it at your own speech endpoint.

Self-hosted model · Custom endpoint

In your cloud tenancy

Use your organisation’s own cloud account, such as AWS Bedrock or your OpenAI or Anthropic agreement, or route through your organisation’s gateway so desktops never hold provider keys.

Bedrock · Organisation gateway

Open-weight models on the device

Gemma 4 E2B 2B
Gemma 4 E4B 4B
Llama 3.2 3B
Qwen 3.5 9B
Gemma 4 12B
GPT-OSS 20B

Downloaded once during setup, then they run offline. Or point it at your own endpoint.

04 / Verify, don’t trust

Don’t take our word for it.
Check it.

Every claim on this page can be checked against the source. Every step happens on your device, or on infrastructure you control, and the files stay within the boundaries you set.

Inspect the source

Read the code that touches the audio.

MIT-licensed source. Your security team can review every line and every dependency.

Trust a build, not a binary.

Compile it in your own environment and evaluate it against your own requirements.

Pull the cable. It keeps working.

Once the app and models are installed, local mode runs with no network connection at all.

We tell you what does go out.

The full list is below. Meeting content only ever goes to an endpoint you run or choose.

Your boundary / device or your infrastructureMeeting content stays inside

Capture

Mic + system audio

Process

Your AI models

Understand

Notes + answers

Retain

Your files

What leaves the device

Meeting content: Never in local mode. Otherwise only to the model endpoint you configure.
Update checks: Version check only. No meeting content.
Usage analytics: Anonymous and switchable off in Settings. No meeting content.
Model downloads: During setup, or when you choose a new model.

05 / Case files · Public record

Verified September 2026

The compromise happens at a
link in the chain that isn’t yours.

None of these were careless organisations. In each case the data was lost outside the walls of the organisation that owned it.

Case 01 UK Ministry of Defence, Afghan relocations · 2022, disclosed 2025

A spreadsheet that left the building

In February 2022 a member of staff at UK Special Forces headquarters emailed out a dataset holding the names and details of roughly 19,000 Afghans who had applied for relocation under ARAP. It was not discovered until August 2023, when part of it surfaced in a Facebook group. The government obtained an unprecedented superinjunction that kept the breach — and a secret resettlement scheme built in response — out of public view until July 2025.

What StenoAI changes

Nothing was hacked. A copy was made and sent, and it could not be recalled. StenoAI cannot stop a person emailing a file, and doesn't claim to — but it adds no copies of its own: no vendor-side duplicate, no automatic sync, no export step in the pipeline. Recordings, transcripts and summaries are ordinary local files, held under whatever controls you already run on that machine.

House of Commons Defence Committee report

Case 02 Microsoft Exchange Online · 2023

A stolen signing key opened government mailboxes

A China-linked actor, tracked as Storm-0558, used a stolen Microsoft consumer signing key to forge authentication tokens and read Exchange Online mailboxes belonging to 22 organisations and more than 500 individuals, including officials at the US State and Commerce Departments. Roughly 60,000 State Department emails were taken. The Cyber Safety Review Board concluded in 2024 that the intrusion was preventable and traced it to a cascade of avoidable failures at Microsoft.

What StenoAI changes

No tenant setting would have stopped this. The affected departments did nothing wrong — the compromise was inside the provider holding their mail. StenoAI removes that dependency for meeting content: there is no provider account, no key and no server holding your transcripts to be compromised.

Cyber Safety Review Board report (CISA, 2024)

Case 03 Otter.ai litigation · 2025

The notetaker itself became the exposure

Class actions consolidated as In re Otter.AI Privacy Litigation in the Northern District of California allege that the AI notetaker joined Zoom, Teams and Google Meet calls and recorded participants who were not its customers, transmitted call content to its servers, and used those conversations to train its models — without the consent of everyone in the room. The claims are unproven and Otter.ai disputes them.

What StenoAI changes

Whatever the outcome, the exposure is structural: once a notetaker sends audio off the device, consent, retention and model-training become somebody else's policy. StenoAI never sends the audio anywhere, so those questions stay yours to answer.

NPR, August 2025

Each incident is a matter of public record, summarised from the linked source. StenoAI is not affiliated with any organisation named here. More case files on the government, defence and law-enforcement pages.

06 / Get started

Two editions. One pipeline.

From one laptop to the
whole organisation.

Try the open-source app on a single laptop today. When a department, unit or force is ready, we take you from briefing to deployment.

Community

Free · MIT licence

The full on-device pipeline
No account and no usage caps
macOS · Windows alpha

Download Community

Enterprise

For teams and organisations

01
Brief
A briefing for your team and security lead.
02
Pilot
A pilot on your own meetings and hardware.
03
Assure
Source, build and data paths for your security review and DPO.
04
Deploy
Roll out on devices or your infrastructure, through your procurement route.

Request a briefing

07 / Questions

Good questions.
Clear answers.

What your team needs to know
before getting started.

Comparing notetakers? See StenoAI vs Otter, Granola and Fireflies

01Can StenoAI work without an internet connection?

Yes. After installing the app and downloading the required models, recording, transcription, summarisation and questions about your notes can all run offline in local mode. Model downloads, software updates and optional connected services require a network.

02Can we run it on our own infrastructure instead?

Yes. Recording always happens on the device, and transcription runs there by default (you can also point it at an OpenAI-compatible speech endpoint you host). Summaries and questions can run on the device, on a model server on your own network (Ollama or an OpenAI-compatible endpoint you host), or in your organisation’s own cloud account such as AWS Bedrock. An organisation gateway can hold provider keys centrally so desktops never see them.

03What stays on our device?

In local mode, meeting audio, transcripts, summaries and AI processing stay on your device. If you configure a cloud model or an organisation integration, content used by that feature follows the configured service’s data path. Choose the deployment and settings appropriate to your information.

04Can our security team review the software?

Yes. StenoAI is open source under the MIT licence. Your team can inspect the source, review dependencies and build it in your own environment. Any authorisation to use it in a classified or regulated environment remains part of your organisation’s assessment.

05Which meeting platforms and devices are supported?

StenoAI captures microphone and system audio directly, so it works with Teams, Zoom, Google Meet, Slack and in-person conversations without adding a meeting bot. The current desktop release supports Apple Silicon Macs on macOS 14.4 or later; Windows 10/11 x64 is available in alpha.

06How do we evaluate StenoAI for our organisation?

Download the open-source desktop app to explore the local workflow, or request a briefing to discuss your use case, environment and deployment requirements. The local app has no per-minute transcription or summarisation limits.

Your next conversation deserves better.

Keep the record.
Keep control.

See what private meeting intelligence
can do for your organisation.

Request a briefing Download the open-source app

Your device or your infrastructure. Never ours.macOS · Windows alpha

The record stays
in the room.