How to record a meeting and transcribe it without sending audio to a US cloud

In Germany and most of the EU, recording a conversation without all participants' explicit consent is at minimum a civil tort and often a criminal offence. Start every recorded meeting by asking out loud: 'I'll be recording this for my own notes - is that OK with everyone?' and capture the answer at the start of the audio. This protects you legally, builds trust, and lets the participants speak more freely.

Open Sprachmemo in a browser tab on the device that has the meeting audio. For an in-person meeting that's your phone or laptop with the mic facing the room. For Zoom / Meet / Teams, that's the same device but with the conferencing app routing audio through it. Don't use the conferencing tool's built-in 'record' button - that uploads audio to their servers (often US-based).

Sprachmemo records mono audio at 16 kHz directly in the browser. The WAV is built client-side and only the encoded file leaves the browser. There's no server-side recording step that could fail half-way and lose the meeting.

When the recording stops, the note title is auto-set to a datestamp. Rename it (Q2 review · 2026-04-09), add tags (q2, review, eng-team) - filters in the list view will remember them.

The transcript appears in the note body within seconds. Free plan ships the small Vosk model (fast, ~92 % accuracy on clean studio audio). Paid plans unlock the large model (~96 % on the same audio).

Spend a minute in the editable transcript fixing the three proper nouns Vosk misheard. Hit Export and you get a Markdown file with the title, the body, every clip's transcript, and the recorded-at timestamp. Drop it into your team's notes system; the audio file is available next to it for anyone who needs the source.