Google’s Foresight takes meeting notes entirely offline on Mac

Google released AI Edge Foresight on October 6, a free experimental Mac app that listens to meetings and turns them into notes without sending any audio or transcript to a server. Everything runs on-device: EmbeddingGemma 2, a 740-million-parameter model, handles search across a user’s files and past transcripts, while Gemma 4 does the writing, expanding whatever shorthand a person typed during a call into a fuller note built from what was actually said. According to 9to5Google, the transcript, audio, and any connected files stay on the Mac throughout, which is the entire point of running both models locally instead of routing the conversation through the cloud the way most meeting-notes tools do.

Capture works at the system level rather than through a specific app’s integration, pulling audio from both the Mac’s microphone and its system output, so Foresight follows a conversation whether it’s happening in Zoom, Google Meet, or in the same room with no software involved at all. The app indexes local folders and Google Drive alongside the calendar, covering PDFs, Google Docs, Office files, and plain text or Markdown, and lets a user tag and filter those sources by category once they’re imported.

The feature that goes beyond ordinary transcription is Live Assistance. While a meeting is running, the app listens for when a topic connects to something already in a user’s indexed files, and surfaces what Google calls a proactive context card, a pop-up carrying the relevant answer along with an exact citation back to the source document. That’s the part that functions less like note-taking software and more like a researcher quietly feeding answers mid-conversation, pulled straight from a person’s own indexed memory rather than the open internet, with a visible source attached every time. For a company that’s spent the past year pushing Gemini deeper into every Google product, shipping a local, offline-first tool that deliberately avoids its own cloud infrastructure is a notable departure, even as an experimental Mac-only release rather than a full product launch.