Earkeep
The Jamie alternative that keeps audio on your device
Last updated: · Reviewed quarterly
Jamie is the closest cloud tool to Earkeep in one respect: it listens through your device instead of sending a bot into the call. It still has to be started per meeting, still uploads your audio to be processed, and still costs €24-99 a month, forever.
14-day full trial, no account required.
- Bot-free like Jamie, but never started
- Audio never leaves your device
- €39 once, not €24-99 a month
The short answer
If "no bot in the meeting" is all you need, Jamie is a real, GDPR-friendly option built for exactly that, and it writes the summaries and logs to the CRM that Earkeep does not. If you want bot-free and zero-interaction and local, Earkeep is the only one of the two that does all three.
Why people look for a Jamie alternative
Bot-free like Jamie, but already listening
Bot-free capture is Jamie's strongest and most genuine overlap with Earkeep: it listens through your device's mic and system audio rather than joining the call as a visible participant. On r/AI_Agents, a user recommending Jamie for exactly that reason wrote: "it doesn't join the meeting at all, so nobody sees anything."
Where they part is that Jamie is still a per-meeting notetaker. You open it and start it for each conversation you want captured, and it has no concept of retroactive capture, so a call that runs long, spills into an unplanned follow-up, or simply happens at someone's desk is a call Jamie does not have.
Earkeep was already listening. You drag a span across the day's timeline afterwards and keep it as a meeting, or let a connected calendar (Google, Apple, Outlook or any ICS URL) mark it for you. A conversation becomes a meeting in retrospect, when you decide it mattered.
Processed on your device, not on Jamie's servers
Jamie's device-level capture still ships your audio off the machine: transcription and summarization happen in Jamie's cloud, which is what lets it offer AI summaries and CRM integrations a fully local tool can't. That is a real trade-off rather than a flaw, but it means "your data never leaves your device" does not apply to Jamie the way it does to Earkeep.
Earkeep transcribes with Whisper or Parakeet models on-device, hardware-accelerated on Apple Silicon. Audio is processed only in memory, never written to disk, never uploaded, never sent to an API. If your reason for avoiding a bot is also a reason to avoid sending audio to someone else's server, Earkeep removes the cloud step entirely rather than just removing the bot.
Your own agents can read your meetings
Earkeep ships in-app support for coding and knowledge agents: Claude Code, Codex, Cursor Agent, Gemini CLI, Hermes, Kimi CLI, OpenClaw, opencode, Pi, Qwen Code, or any ACP-compatible agent, run directly against your meeting history, plus an MCP server so external tools like Claude Desktop or Cursor can read your meetings too.
The research behind this page found no documented MCP server or agent integration for Jamie, so we don't claim one either way. What is clear is that Earkeep's history sits in plain local files both the in-app agents and the MCP server can query, so the transcript that captured a stakeholder commitment can be handed straight to the agent already doing the rest of your work.
Side by side
| Capability | Earkeep | Jamie |
|---|---|---|
| Always-on capture | No start/stop | Meeting by meeting |
| Bot-free | No participant joins | No participant joins |
| Captures system audio | Mic and system audio | Device-level audio |
| Captures in-person meetings | Anything the device hears | In person, online and hybrid |
| Audio processed on your device | Never leaves your device | Sent to Jamie's cloud |
| Retroactive spans | Or marked by your calendar | No timeline or spans |
| AI-written notes when it ends | No, but an agent you connect writes them from the transcript | Its core output |
| Labels who said what | Not yet | On the €48/mo Pro tier; users report it merging quiet speakers |
| Your own agents can read it | ACP agents plus an MCP server | None documented |
| Logs meetings to your CRM | No, but your agent reaches them through its own connections | On the Pro tier |
| Runs on Windows | macOS 13+ for now | Mac and Windows |
| Free tier that doesn't expire | 14 days free, then €39 once | Five meetings a month |
| One-time purchase | €39, one device | Per month |
| Pricing | €39 once, one device | Free (5 meetings/mo), then €24/mo Standard, €48/mo Pro, €99/mo Enterprise |
| Platform | macOS 13+ | Mac and Windows capture, cloud processing |
Built inNo, but an agent you connect canPartlyNot available
What each one costs by year five
Switching takes an afternoon
- Install it, then forget about it for a day. Earkeep starts listening as soon as it is running, so a first day of real meetings is captured before you have configured anything. There is no import tool: Earkeep cannot migrate your Jamie notes, and they stay in Jamie's cloud where they already are.
- Mark yesterday, or connect a calendar. Drag a span across the timeline where a meeting was, or point Earkeep at Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, Outlook or any ICS URL and let every event title its own span.
- Cancel the plan once you trust it. The trial runs 14 days with no account and no card, long enough to compare two weeks of real meetings against what Jamie was giving you. What Earkeep kept is already plain files on your disk, so there is nothing to export if you change your mind.
Which one fits you
Choose Earkeep if
You liked Jamie for keeping the bot out, and want the cloud out too.
- Bot-free is not enough on its own: the audio must not leave the machine either
- Plenty of what matters is said in conversations nobody remembered to start a recorder for
- You'd rather pay €39 once, less than two months of Jamie Standard, than €24-99 every month
- You want the full verbatim record as plain files you own, not summaries in someone's account
- Your own agents and MCP tools should be able to read your meetings directly
Choose Jamie if
Jamie does several things Earkeep does not, and it's worth saying so plainly.
- You want cloud AI summaries and CRM integrations out of the box: Jamie's Pro and Enterprise tiers include both, and Earkeep doesn't do AI summaries today
- You only need a handful of meetings a month and want to pay nothing: Jamie's free tier covers 5 meetings a month, which costs less than Earkeep's €39 up front if that volume is genuinely enough
- You're fine with per-meeting recording, because you reliably remember to start it before every meeting
- You want an established EU-focused reputation, with more market history and third-party review coverage than a newer local-first tool
- Your primary machine runs Windows, which Jamie supports and Earkeep does not yet
Jamie's positioning is aimed at anyone who wants a discreet cloud notetaker for in-person, online and hybrid meetings, with the summary and the CRM entry written for them. Earkeep's audience is product and engineering roles who already run their own coding or knowledge agents, and who lose that connection with a cloud tool that exposes no way to feed its transcripts to one. See Earkeep for product owners for the role-specific version.
Other tools people weigh this against
Anyone shopping for a Jamie alternative usually has a few other tabs open. Each of these gets the same treatment as this page: Granola, Otter.ai, Fireflies.ai, Fathom, tl;dv, MacWhisper, Limitless and Plaud, or all nine side by side.
Frequently asked questions
Is Earkeep a good Jamie alternative?
It is, if what drew you to Jamie was keeping a bot out of the call rather than the notes it writes afterwards. Earkeep keeps that same device-level, bot-free architecture and goes further: it never has to be started, and the audio is transcribed on your device instead of being uploaded. What Earkeep does not do is write the summary, label who said what, or log anything to your CRM, and it runs on macOS 13+ only for now.
Does Jamie put a bot in my meeting?
No. Jamie captures audio at the device level, mic and system audio, the same architecture Earkeep uses, so no visible bot joins the call. This is the main reason people choose Jamie over bot-based tools like Otter or Fireflies.
Is Jamie's transcription processed locally or in the cloud?
Cloud. Jamie's device-level audio capture is uploaded for cloud-based transcription and summarization. Earkeep processes audio only in memory, on-device, and never uploads it.
Does Jamie record automatically, or do I have to start it?
You start it per meeting; Jamie has no always-on or retroactive capture. Earkeep runs continuously and lets you mark any span of the day as a kept meeting afterward, or have a connected calendar do it automatically.
How much does Jamie cost compared to Earkeep?
Jamie is free for 5 meetings a month with basic summaries, then €24/month for Standard (unlimited meetings, 20+ languages, task detection), €48/month for Pro (advanced AI, speaker labels, CRM integrations), or €99/month for Enterprise. A Reddit user testing note-taking apps for in-person meetings called Jamie "really expensive once the free tier is done." Over two years, Standard alone runs €576 and Pro runs €1,152. Earkeep is €39 once, for one device, with a 14-day full-featured free trial (no email, no account) and a 14-day money-back refund after purchase, and it keeps working through offline stretches because licence checks use an offline grace period rather than a live cloud connection.
Does Jamie work with AI agents or MCP?
There's no documented MCP server or agent integration for Jamie in the research behind this page. Earkeep ships an MCP server and in-app ACP agent support so external and in-app agents can read your meeting history directly.
See the difference on your own meetings
14-day full trial, no account required.