Google's AI Edge Foresight Transcribes Meetings Entirely on Your Mac

Google launched AI Edge Foresight this week, a note-taking app that transcribes meetings and answers questions about your files without sending any of it to a data center. The app runs locally on your machine, and right now it only runs on Mac.

That local-first design is the whole point. Google says Foresight processes transcription and audio on your computer, and your personal information, files, recordings and transcripts won't be moved to the cloud. It also works offline, with query and assistance features still available.

What does Foresight actually do?

The app sits in the background and listens, transcribing conversations as they happen. It connects to Google Meet, Zoom and plain offline conversations, and it reads across a range of formats:

• PDFs
• Google Docs
• Microsoft Office formats
• Plain text and Markdown
• Web bookmarks

You can jot quick bullet points mid-meeting and Foresight will turn them into polished notes based on the transcript. You can also take your own notes alongside the AI's transcription on a single screen, so you're not switching windows.

The follow-up features matter just as much. Foresight can reference your files to answer questions, or you can switch on its Live Assistance feature to answer questions automatically. Custom labels, filtering and search all work locally. Google also claims the background technology has low battery drain.

In short: it's a full meeting-notes workflow that never leaves the laptop.

Why does local processing matter?

AI note-taking is a crowded field. The source points to Scribe, Granola and Notion AI as established players, and notes that most of these apps use the cloud to access and store data. That's a privacy risk, especially when the material being captured is a live conversation with colleagues or clients.

Local-first alternatives already exist, including Meetily and Whisper AI, which reduce that exposure by keeping data on-device. Foresight puts Google in that camp, which is notable for a company whose business is built on cloud infrastructure and data centers.

For users in regulated industries or anyone handling sensitive conversations, an offline-capable option from a major vendor changes the calculus. The takeaway: privacy here is architectural, not a policy promise.

What's the catch?

Foresight only works on MacOS. Google hasn't said whether it will sync with Gmail or when a Windows version might arrive, and the company didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

That leaves a large share of potential users — Windows remains the dominant desktop platform — waiting. It also leaves open questions about how Foresight fits with Google's own ecosystem if Gmail and Calendar stay out of the loop for now.

Until Google answers those questions, Foresight is a Mac-only experiment in what fully local AI productivity looks like from a hyperscaler.