Acta·Diurna

Nobody has to guess who said it.

Acta Diurna writes your meeting down on your own machine, with every speaker already named.

I never said the horse should be consul.
CALIGVLAVP, Provinces
It is in the acta diurna, Caligula.
BERENICEChief of Staff
With your name on it.
CARACALLAHead of Operations
On your disk, as they talk
~/acta/meet-20260824-1030/transcript.mdwritten locally
## [00:12:04]
CALIGVLA
I never said the horse should be consul.

## [00:12:19]
BERENICE
It is in the acta diurna, Caligula.

## [00:12:24]
CARACALLA
With your name on it.

Google Meet hands your machine one audio stream per participant, with the name already on it. Acta Diurna writes that down, locally. No bot joins the call, nothing is uploaded, and no model is left to work out whose voice it just heard.

Buy a licenceSee what it writes

From the call to your folder, and nowhere else.

Three steps, and none of them leave the room you are sitting in.

  1. In the call

    Nobody joins. No bot, no waiting room, no fourth participant called Notetaker — and because Meet already knows who is speaking, the name arrives with the voice.

  2. On your machine

    The sound crosses from the tab to Acta Diurna, and stops there.

  3. In your folder

    Transcribed on your own hardware, into a document you can open, move or delete.

Never leaves this machine
The audioNever
The transcriptNever
Who was in the roomNever

No account, no tracking, and no company holding anything of yours. The only thing Acta Diurna ever sends is a version number, when it looks for a new release. Delete the folder and the meeting is gone.

A record you can quote from.

One meeting, one document, written while the meeting is still running. Every turn carries the time and the person who said it, so even an interrupted call leaves you something you can search, quote, and send to a colleague without exporting anything from anywhere.

The acta live terminal view during a call: five capture channels with level meters and durations, a queue line reading captured 19m15s, transcribed 17m10s, backlog 2m04s, and a transcript column of timestamped, named turns. 31 windows transcribed. The meeting and the names in it are invented. On a phone the capture is the same view taken in an 80-column terminal, cropped to the transcript column alone.The acta live terminal view during a call: five capture channels with level meters and durations, a queue line reading captured 19m15s, transcribed 17m10s, backlog 2m04s, and a transcript column of timestamped, named turns. 31 windows transcribed. The meeting and the names in it are invented. On a phone the capture is the same view taken in an 80-column terminal, cropped to the transcript column alone.
acta live, mid-meeting — a test call, invented names.

Acta Diurna learns your words without learning your voice.

Every practice has words no transcription has met before: client names, matter numbers, the way your firm writes a statute. The usual answer is to train a model on your recordings. We tried that and refused it — the words were not being misheard, they were being written as ordinary words, and training cannot fix a spelling convention.

So you write the list yourself, and it is applied afterwards. Every change is recorded with the rule behind it, and the original transcript is never altered, so a wrong rule is easy to see and easy to undo — which is not something a trained model can offer. One shared list keeps the firm’s vocabulary in one place instead of in eight people’s heads.

“cross undertaking”cross-undertaking in damages
“harlow bee cee”Harlow BC
“matter four one seven”Matter 417

We write the record.

Acta Diurna is your meeting record. Your agent does the rest.

Every other tool wants the whole workflow inside its own app: the recording, the summary, the action items, the search, the integrations, the subscription. You end up renting a second inbox that happens to hold your meetings.

Acta Diurna stops at the part that is genuinely hard and genuinely ours: a clean, chronological, correctly attributed record. What happens next is your choice — paste it into whatever assistant you already pay for, and there is a Claude Code skill for exactly this. It is plain text, and it is not locked behind anything.

What the others do differently.

There is no shortage of tools that write down meetings. They divide neatly into two kinds, and each kind gives up something this buyer cannot give up.

Acta DiurnaCloud notetakersOtter, Fireflies, Fathom, GranolaLocal open sourceMeetily, Hyprnote
Where the audio goesYour machineTheir serversYour machine
Who joins the callNobodyA bot, in most of themNobody
Getting it runningInstall it and recordSign up, connect your calendarSelf-hosted: you pick the models and bring your own keys
How it knows who spokeRead from Google MeetGuessed from the audioGuessed from the audio
What you end up withA file in your folderAn account you log intoA file in your folder
If the company disappearsKeeps workingYour meetings go with itKeeps working
What it costs€69 a year, or €199 onceRoughly €19–30 per person, per monthFree

The open-source tools are free and they keep your audio at home, which is most of the argument. What you are paying for is that the arguing is over: the model, the settings and the pipeline are already chosen and tuned, so there is nothing to assemble and nothing to keep working. And because the names come from the call itself, nothing downstream has to be double-checked.

Competitors’ prices checked August 2026 and quoted from their public pricing pages.

Buy a licence. That is the whole relationship.

No account to create, nothing to log into, no service in the middle. It works with the internet switched off, and an expired licence never stops a recording in progress or takes away a transcript you already have.

One seat, yearly€69per year
  • Everything the tool does
  • Updates for the year
  • Your recordings stay readable either way
Buy yearly
One seat, once€199lifetime, no renewal
  • No renewal to remember
  • Works with or without us
Buy once
Five seats or more€49per seat, per year
  • The same tool, less per person
  • One invoice, one VAT number
Talk to us
Founder priceThe first 50 customers keep their price for as long as they are held; after that the list price goes up. This is the only discount there will be — no seasonal sales, no coupon worth waiting for.

What it needs, and what it is not.

Platform
macOS on Apple Silicon. Windows and Linux are not supported and are not being worked on.
What you install
Two things, and both are needed: the Acta Diurna app on your Mac, and an unlisted Chrome extension you install from a link. The extension on its own does nothing.
Calls
Google Meet, in Chrome, with the extension loaded. Zoom and Teams are not supported.
Consent
Acta Diurna is your recorder, not a participant: it never joins the call and never announces itself, so telling the room is a decision you make, the way you would with a notepad. Most places require it.
Retention
Nothing is deleted for you. A meeting stays on your disk until you delete the folder, and no copy exists anywhere else.
Not a summariser
No AI summary, no action-item extraction, no chat over your meetings — on purpose. It writes the record and hands it to whatever agent you already use.
Not a service
There is nothing to sign into. If we disappear, the program on your disk keeps working.

Your next call, written down and still yours.

Buy a licenceRead how it works