Engineering5 min
Why nothing joins your meeting, and what that cost
Every notetaker joins your call as a participant, because the platform hands over the audio. The other way to get both sides, and its costs.
Features
Everything it does,and all of it is free
There is no tier above this. What follows is the whole application, which is unusual enough to be worth stating before the list rather than after it.
Apple Silicon · free forever for individuals · no account · v0.5.0
Four things nothing else does
The notes are the table stakes.These four are why it exists.
Everything that coaches you live is cloud. Everything that runs on your machine is a notetaker. HuddleOwl is the only one that is both.
01
Coaching nobody else in the call can see
Visible to you, absent from the recording, the Zoom share and the Loom. Clicks pass straight through to whatever is underneath.
See it02
Every score quotes the line that earned it
A cue that cannot point at the sentence it reacts to is discarded before you ever see it. That rule lives in the backend, not in a prompt.
See it03
It reads the entire call, not the last five minutes
Map reduced across the full transcript, and the chunking never splits a speaking turn, so a quote is never half a sentence.
See it04
The whole thing runs with the wifi off
Download a model once and there is no account, no API key and no network. Same rubric, same quotes, same speed.
See itDuring the call
In the room
- Cues while you are still talking
- A card appears when there is something to do about it: a question you skipped, an objection you talked past, a buying signal you missed.
- Every cue quotes the line
- A cue that cannot point at the sentence it is reacting to is discarded in the backend before you see it. That rule lives in code, not in a prompt.
- A cue budget
- Four cues a call by default. An eager model asked every ten seconds will always find advice, which is how one call produces thirty-three cards nobody reads.
- Signal scores that move
- Six live reads for your role, updating as the call moves, so you can see it slipping before it has slipped.
- Both sides, no bot
- Native system audio on macOS, loopback on Windows. Nothing appears in the participant list.
- Stealth mode
- The window is excluded from screen capture at the OS level, clicks pass through to whatever is underneath, and one shortcut brings it back.
Live coaching
After you hang up
The review
- A scored rubric, not a summary
- Five dimensions for the role you were playing, each with a reason and the exact line that earned it. A dimension the call never tested is left unscored.
- It reads the whole transcript
- Map-reduced across the entire call rather than whatever fits one context window, and the chunking never splits a speaking turn, so a quote is never half a sentence.
- The one next step
- A specific, dated commitment, exportable as a calendar file.
- A follow-up email in your voice
- Derived once from a few of your own emails, then reused. Four tone presets if you would rather not.
- Full-text search
- Across every transcript, cue, decision and draft email you have, running on your own disk.
- Import an old recording
- Drop in an audio file and it comes back with the same transcript, rubric and evidence quotes as a live call.
Post-meeting brief
Where it all happens
On your machine
- On-device transcription and coaching
- Download two models once and the app needs nothing from anyone. Not a degraded offline mode: the same rubric, the same evidence quotes, about 40 seconds to a brief.
- 23 languages
- Transcribed on device, with the language detected once per track and then locked so it cannot drift mid-call.
- Bring your own model
- Point it at 100+ providers or your own endpoint and pay your provider directly. No per-seat AI markup.
- No account, ever
- Nothing to sign up for, nothing to sign in to, nothing to cancel.
- Your data is a folder
- Open it from inside the app. Delete it and there is nothing left anywhere, because there is no server holding a copy.
- Light and dark
- Including the highest-contrast palette it has for stealth mode over an unknown desktop.
Settings, on-device models
HuddleOwl
How this is built
All posts
Free, and it takes two minutes
No account, no card, no bot in your next call. Download it and run one meeting through it.
Apple Silicon · free forever for individuals · no account · v0.5.0