Earkeep
The Wispr Flow alternative that transcribes on your device
Last updated: · Reviewed quarterly
Wispr Flow's Notetaker genuinely never joins your call, and its dictation is the best in the business. But it records a meeting at a time and transcribes every one of them in Wispr's cloud. Earkeep records all day and does the transcription on your own machine.
14-day full trial, no account required.
- Transcribed on your device, not in a US cloud
- All day, not one meeting at a time
- €39 once, not $12 per user per month
The short answer
If you already dictate into every text box, Wispr Flow is the better buy: the notetaker comes free inside a tool you open a hundred times a day, it names speakers from your calendar, and it writes the summary for you. Two things it does not do are why this page exists. It records one meeting at a time, so "I forgot to start it" is still a sentence you can say. And its own privacy page states that transcription always happens in its cloud, on every plan. "Records on your device" and "processed on your device" are two claims, not one, and only Earkeep makes the second.
Why people look for a Wispr Flow alternative
A meeting you have to catch, or a day already recorded
Notetaker is per-meeting, not continuous. It watches your calendar and starts when a detected meeting begins, or when you press Opt+M or hit record in the Flow Bar. Wispr's own help-centre article gives the rest: a recording stops when you leave the call, or at a maximum length you configure "between 30 minutes and 3 hours".
That is a good notetaker, and it is still a trigger. The conversation that turned out to matter is often the one nobody scheduled: the ten minutes after a call ends, the at-desk question that became a decision, the huddle someone started in Slack. Earkeep has no start button. It listens from launch, and you mark which stretch of the day was the meeting once you know it was one. To stop it, you pause it, mark a calendar meeting never-record, or purge the stretch afterwards.
Recorded on your device is not processed on your device
Wispr's launch write-up says Notetaker "runs on your device", and its bot-free page says it "records on your device, so nothing joins the call". Both are true of the recording, which really is the part that happens locally. The next step is the one that phrasing does not separate out, and Wispr's own privacy page states it without hedging: "Transcription always happens in the cloud to provide the best speed and accuracy." There is no local option, on any plan.
So every meeting leaves the machine to be transcribed, in the United States, with no regional option, and the transcript is kept in Wispr's private cloud to sync between devices. Their data-controls page adds that zero data retention does not cover all of it: "Certain features, such as briefs for Notetaker, rely on features from third party AI providers that are not supported under zero data retention." None of it is hidden; it is just a different architecture than the words suggest.
Earkeep transcribes in memory on your own device with whisper.cpp or Parakeet, hardware-accelerated on Apple silicon. Audio is never written to disk and never uploaded, so there is no region to ask about and no retention setting to set. For the client call under NDA, that is the whole question.
A record you own, in files that outlive the app
Notetaker's output lives in a Wispr account. You can copy a note out as markdown, one at a time, and its hosted MCP server hands summaries, transcripts and attendees to Claude or ChatGPT. The audio is a firmer no: Wispr's privacy policy says the encrypted meeting audio it retains is "not intended to be user-accessible, searchable, replayable, or exportable". It is kept, and you cannot hear it.
Earkeep keeps no audio at all, which is a cleaner promise than keeping it where you cannot reach it. What it keeps is one plain .jsonl file per day, spans marked inline, in a folder you chose. grep works on it now and in ten years, with or without Earkeep installed.
Against those files Earkeep runs ten ACP agents in-app, as your own CLI with your own key, plus a read-only MCP server on loopback so Claude Desktop or Cursor can read your spans. Wispr's MCP is hosted and reaches more kinds of data; Earkeep's is local, over files you can open yourself.
Side by side
| Capability | Earkeep | Wispr Flow |
|---|---|---|
| Bot-free | No bot ever joins | No bot ever joins |
| Always-on capture | No start/stop, all day | Per meeting, calendar or Opt+M |
| Audio transcribed on your device | In memory, whisper.cpp or Parakeet | Records locally, transcribes in cloud |
| Retroactive spans | Define the meeting afterward | A meeting is one you started |
| Keeps a recording you can replay | No audio is ever kept | Retained, not user-accessible |
| Meetings as plain files you own | One .jsonl per day, greppable | Cloud account, markdown copy out |
| AI summary and action items | No, but an agent you connect writes them from the transcript | Topic summaries, decisions, owners |
| Labels who said what | Not yet | Named from calendar and Slack |
| Ask questions across your meeting history | No, but your agent searches spans over MCP | Cross-meeting search, cited |
| Your own agents can read it | ACP agents plus a local MCP server | MCP server, but over Wispr's cloud store |
| Transcribes languages other than English | Many, on device | Notetaker is English only |
| Dictation across your whole computer | Not what Earkeep does | 100+ languages, the mature half |
| Mobile app | Desktop only | iPhone and Android, dictation only |
| Free tier that doesn't expire | 14 days free, then €39 once | Free plan includes the Notetaker |
| SSO, admin controls, HIPAA BAA | None, and none planned | SAML/OIDC, org toggle, BAA |
| One-time purchase | €39, one device | Per user, per month |
| Pricing | €39 one time, one device | Free tier, then $12-15/user/month |
| Platform | macOS 13+ | Notetaker macOS only; dictation also Windows and mobile |
Built inNo, but an agent you connect canPartlyNot available
What each one costs by year five
Switching takes an afternoon
- Install it, then let a day run. Earkeep listens as soon as it is running, so a first day of real meetings, online and in person, is captured before you configure anything. There is no import tool: your Wispr notes and transcripts stay in your Wispr account, and the audio was never exportable in the first place.
- 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. Then open the agent panel on that span and let your agent write the notes to a directory you choose.
- Decide what you are actually replacing. Probably not the dictation: Earkeep does not do it, and Wispr Flow's is excellent, so plenty of people keep both, Flow doing the typing and Earkeep holding the record. Earkeep is €39 once per device, with a 14-day trial that asks for no email, against $144 per user per year for Flow Pro.
Which one fits you
Choose Earkeep if
The meeting you would not put in someone else's cloud is the one this was built for.
- Confidential calls mean the transcription has to happen on your machine, not just the recording
- Your week has conversations nobody scheduled, and remembering a shortcut is the failure point
- Your meetings are not in English, which Notetaker does not handle yet
- You want plain files you can grep, and your own agents reading them directly
- You would rather pay €39 once, with no account, than a per-seat bill forever
Choose Wispr Flow if
Wispr Flow does several things Earkeep has no answer to, and that is worth saying plainly.
- Dictation is the job: speaking into every text box all day is what Wispr Flow is for, and Earkeep does not do it at all
- You need to know who said what: Notetaker names speakers from calendar, Slack and Gmail context, and one correction propagates across the transcript. Earkeep has no diarisation
- You want a free tier rather than a trial: the Notetaker is on the free plan, with speaker labels, meeting Q&A and MCP. Earkeep's 14 days then stop
- You want it on your phone: Wispr Flow ships an iPhone app, Earkeep is desktop only
- You dictate in several languages: 100+ with auto-detection, and its summaries, briefs and cross-meeting search have no Earkeep equivalent
One thing worth weighing whichever way you lean: the dictation half of Wispr Flow is mature, and the Notetaker half shipped on 2026-08-05, with Wispr's own account calling it "a new tool" on 2026-08-13. If you land there, the free plan is a reasonable place to start; this page is meant to help you pick the right tool rather than ours. Earkeep is for the roles whose week is full of in-person 1:1s and at-desk conversations nobody scheduled: see Earkeep for product managers and Earkeep for executives.
Other tools people weigh this against
Wispr Flow's Notetaker took its first cohort from Granola, which is where most readers of this page arrive from, and Granola gets the same treatment. So do Jamie and Krisp, the other bot-free tools, MacWhisper if local transcription is what you care about, Otter.ai for the incumbent, or all sixteen side by side.
Frequently asked questions
Is Earkeep a good Wispr Flow alternative?
For the meeting half, yes, for two reasons: both are bot-free, but Earkeep transcribes on your device where Wispr transcribes in its cloud, and it records the whole day rather than one meeting at a time. For the dictation half there is nothing to compare, because Earkeep does not do dictation. It also has no speaker labels, no summaries, no mobile app and no free tier beyond 14 days.
Does Wispr Flow's notetaker run on your device?
The recording does; the transcription does not. Notetaker captures system audio on your Mac without joining the call, which is what "runs on your device" and "records on your device" describe. Wispr's privacy page then states: "Transcription always happens in the cloud to provide the best speed and accuracy." No setting on any plan changes that; their compliance FAQ puts the processing and storage in the United States, with no regional option. Earkeep does the transcription on the device, in memory, and writes only text to disk.
Does Wispr Flow's notetaker work in languages other than English?
Not yet. Wispr Flow's dictation handles 100+ languages with auto-detection, but the Notetaker is documented as English only, with more "coming soon", and Mac only as of 2026-09-01. Earkeep transcribes many languages on your device, and you pick the model and the language yourself: see languages and models.
Is Wispr Flow's free notetaker good enough to skip Earkeep entirely?
For a lot of people, honestly, yes: it is free, it names speakers, it summarises, and it is already installed if you dictate. The free plan caps how many meetings you can record each week, and Wispr does not publish the number. Choose Earkeep instead if the transcription has to stay on your machine, you want the whole day rather than the meetings you remembered to start, and you want the record as files you own.
Can I keep Wispr Flow for dictation and use Earkeep for meetings?
Yes, and it is the setup we would expect most people to land on. They do different jobs: Wispr Flow turns your voice into text you meant to write, Earkeep keeps a record of conversations you were having. Both expose a read-only MCP server, so an agent can read either.
Keep the record on your own machine
14-day full trial, no account required.