Steno for Defense
Built for the discussions that can't touch a cloud.
Operational planning and sensitive discussions run on hardware you control, on networks you control. Steno does the entire pipeline — capture, transcription, summary — on the device, offline, with nothing transiting an external server. It's designed for air-gapped, local-only deployments — the environment cloud notetakers structurally can't serve. (Accreditation for any specific classified environment is a function of your own deployment and authorization process, not the app alone.)
Why cloud tools don't fit
- Cloud transcription is a non-starter when the audio can't leave the enclave.
- SaaS meeting assistants require connectivity and a vendor relationship you can't extend to classified work.
- A meeting bot is an external participant — unacceptable in an operational context.
Fully offline
No network dependency after setup. Steno runs on air-gapped and disconnected systems where SaaS tools cannot.
Nothing leaves the device
Audio, transcripts, and summaries stay on the machine. There is no upload path and no vendor in the data flow.
On-device models
Transcription (Parakeet, Whisper) and summarization run locally on your hardware — no external inference service is ever called.
Open and inspectable
MIT-licensed source your security authority can review and build in a controlled environment.
On compliance
Steno runs entirely on your device. Your meeting recordings, transcripts, and summaries never reach our servers — there is no third-party processor handling your meeting data, which addresses a meaningful part of HIPAA, GDPR, and data-residency exposure. (Those frameworks also cover safeguards, agreements, and processes that remain your responsibility — no tool hands you compliance.) Steno itself isn't a certified cloud service, because there is no cloud service handling your meetings to certify — and that's the point: the vendor-breach risk that frameworks such as SOC 2 exist to assure against isn't in that path.
Questions
Yes — that's a primary design target. After the one-time model download, everything runs with no network connection at all.
No. Steno makes no network calls with your meeting content. Recordings, transcripts, and summaries are ordinary files in local storage on your device.
Yes. It's open source, so it can be audited and built from source in your own environment before deployment.
Also built for: Government · Legal · Healthcare · Finance · Executive
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Free. Open source. No account needed.
macOS 14.4+ (Apple Silicon) · Windows 10/11 (x64, alpha — unsigned) · ~4 GB for the default model