Most meeting tools now give you some way to retrieve what happened. You might be able to download a transcript, copy a summary, connect an MCP server, call an API, or export your entire account.

That is progress. But it still makes ownership something you have to exercise later.

You have to remember to export the meeting. You have to authorize another service. You have to maintain a script, keep an integration connected, or trust that the vendor will continue offering the same API on the same plan.

Earmark takes a different approach. When a meeting ends, the desktop app automatically writes the full transcript to a plain Markdown file on your device. It is enabled by default, requires no integration, and works for both standard and temporary meetings. By default, those files appear in:

~/Documents/Earmark/Meeting Transcripts/

You can change the location or turn the feature off, but you never have to press an export button to create the local record. Earmark local transcript documentation

That sounds like a small implementation detail. We think it changes what your meeting history can become.

Your highest-density context is usually the hardest to use

Think about what happens in a typical meeting. A customer explains why a workflow is failing. An engineer surfaces a constraint that changes the plan. Someone makes a decision after weeks of ambiguity. A teammate casually shares the one detail that will matter three months from now.

This is some of the highest-density context a company produces. Yet the default copy usually ends up inside the meeting vendor’s workspace, accessible through its interface and organized according to its model of your work.

The problem is not that every meeting tool makes retrieval impossible. That would no longer be accurate. Several now offer Markdown downloads, APIs, MCP connections, or other ways to retrieve meeting content.

The problem is that most of these paths require a second step.

The transcript becomes portable only after someone remembers to download it, copies it to another application, authorizes an agent, or builds an automated pipeline. Until then, the meeting remains something you can access rather than something you possess in an immediately usable form.

Local agents have changed what a transcript can be

The tools that can use meeting context are increasingly running close to the work itself.

Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Claude Cowork, Obsidian, command-line tools, and local scripts can already reason across the files on your computer. They can inspect a codebase, search a project folder, compare versions, and synthesize information from ordinary documents.

But they cannot automatically use a meeting archive they cannot see.

You can solve that with an MCP connection or API. For some teams, that is exactly the right solution. But it introduces another layer: authentication, configuration, network access, vendor availability, and whatever permissions or plan restrictions apply.

A folder of Markdown files removes that layer. Point an agent at the folder and ask:

• What meetings did I have this week, and what did I commit to?

• I am about to meet with Sam. What should I remember from our previous conversations?

• What decisions were made in Monday’s product sync?

• Which customer requests have appeared in more than one conversation?

• What unresolved questions keep resurfacing?

• Implement the architecture change we agreed on during Tuesday’s engineering meeting.

There is no retrieval interface for the agent to learn. The meetings look like the rest of the user’s working context because they are ordinary files.

How Earmark compares with other meeting tools

The distinction is narrower than “Earmark lets you get your data out.” Several products do that well.

The relevant question is what exists without any follow-up work: does the product automatically leave a full, user-visible transcript file on the user’s machine, and can an external agent read it without first connecting to the meeting vendor?

The following comparison is based on publicly available first-party documentation reviewed September 4, 2026. “Automatic local transcript” means that the product writes an ordinary local file without requiring a per-meeting export, integration, or user-maintained sync job.

What the comparison actually shows

Earmark is not the only product taking data ownership seriously.

Anarlog and Meetily arguably go further on fully local infrastructure. They emphasize local databases, local transcription, local models, self-hosting, or open-source extensibility. If the primary requirement is keeping inference and application data on the user’s own hardware, either may be a better fit.

Notion is especially powerful when the company already treats Notion as its system of record. Its MCP and Markdown API make meeting pages accessible to agents without forcing users to download every transcript.

Granola, Plaud, Fireflies, Otter, and tl;dv also provide increasingly capable ways to retrieve meeting history through MCP, APIs, CLIs, downloads, or the clipboard. These are meaningful improvements over a completely closed archive.

Earmark’s distinction is what happens by default.

Among the tools reviewed, Earmark is the only one that publicly documents an automatic, local, full-transcript Markdown file after every completed meeting. Portability does not depend on someone remembering to exercise it. The durable copy already exists before the user knows what they will want to do with it.

That is the point.

Why Markdown, specifically

We could have used a proprietary export format, JSON, or an application database. Any of those could hold the words that were spoken. But meeting context becomes more valuable when it is accessible without specialized tooling.

Markdown is the closest thing AI tools have to a shared written language. Local agents understand it naturally. Editors, note-taking tools, knowledge systems, static-site generators, version-control systems, and scripts all handle it well. There is almost no translation layer between the transcript and the tool being asked to use it.

It is also structured enough to support real work. Earmark’s files contain YAML frontmatter with information such as the meeting title, date, participants, timezone, and workspace. Filenames are based on the meeting’s start time, so they sort chronologically in any file browser. An agent, Obsidian vault, command-line search, or small script can filter meetings by participant, project, date, or title without reverse-engineering a proprietary format. Earmark local transcript documentation

Most importantly, Markdown remains readable without Earmark. You can open it in any text editor. You can move it into another knowledge system. You can put it under version control, back it up, search it, transform it, or delete it.

The file does not become useless if your tooling changes.

Automatic matters more than exportable

A feature can technically provide data ownership without producing much practical ownership.

If exporting is something users must remember to do after each meeting, the resulting archive will always be incomplete. The forgotten meeting will inevitably be the one containing the decision someone needs six months later.

APIs and MCP connections solve a different version of the problem. They make a vendor’s archive more accessible, but access still depends on the service, an authenticated account, network availability, supported permissions, and the continued existence of the integration.

A local auto-save changes the sequence. The transcript becomes an ordinary file first. Everything else happens afterward.

You can connect an agent if you want. You can index the folder. You can move it into Obsidian. You can build a retrieval system, run a weekly review, or write a script that converts decisions into tickets. But the durable underlying record does not depend on any of those systems continuing to work.

The integration is the file.

What people build when the files are already there

The simplest use case is a pre-meeting briefing. Before a recurring one-on-one, ask an agent to review previous meetings with the same person and summarize commitments, unresolved issues, and anything that should be revisited. The continuity that usually depends on someone’s memory becomes part of the preparation process.

The same folder can support meeting-aware coding. A team can discuss an architecture decision, end the call, and ask Claude Code, Cursor, or Codex to inspect the transcript before implementing what was agreed. The agent gets the reasoning and constraints behind the decision, not just a short ticket written afterward.

The files can also become part of a personal knowledge vault. Add the transcript folder to Obsidian—or point an existing knowledge workflow at it—and meetings become searchable documents alongside research, product notes, plans, and project history.

Weekly reviews become dramatically simpler. An agent can scan seven days of meetings and assemble the decisions made, commitments given, risks surfaced, and questions left unresolved.

None of this requires Earmark to anticipate and build every possible integration. People can use the tools they already prefer because the underlying context is available in a format those tools already understand.

Files are the universal integration.

Ownership is not a checkbox

There is also a quieter argument here about trust.

When the only complete copy of your meeting history lives inside a vendor’s cloud, the relationship is asymmetric. Leaving the product may mean exporting years of history, rebuilding integrations, or losing the structure that made the archive useful.

A local Markdown corpus changes that relationship. Your ability to leave is not theoretical. Your meeting history already exists outside the product in an open format.

We would rather earn the decision to keep using Earmark than make leaving painful.

This does not mean that a local file is the same thing as fully local processing. Those are separate questions, and products such as Anarlog and Meetily make stronger documented claims about local inference and self-hosted infrastructure.

Earmark’s claim is more specific: when the meeting ends, the user already has a durable, agent-readable copy of the transcript under their control.

The small details make the system dependable

Local transcripts work for temporary meetings as well as standard meetings, so an ephemeral capture can still leave a durable record.

If a meeting receives a better system-generated title after its file has been written, Earmark automatically updates the filename rather than leaving the user with an archive of generic titles.

Filenames use UTC timestamps so chronological sorting remains consistent. The Markdown frontmatter retains the user’s local timezone so the meeting is still understandable in human terms.

The save location can be changed under Settings → Personalization → Meeting files, and the feature can be disabled entirely. Local transcript files are available in the Earmark desktop application for macOS and Windows beginning with version 1.4.1. Earmark local transcript documentation

Your meetings were always your data

The meeting-assistant market is moving in the right direction. Exports are improving. APIs are becoming more capable. MCP is making cloud archives easier for agents to query. Local-first products are demonstrating that transcription and inference do not always need to happen on someone else’s infrastructure.

Earmark’s bet is that the durable copy should not depend on a future integration or a decision someone has to remember to make.

When the meeting ends, the transcript is already on your machine. When you need the context, your agent can already read it. When your workflow changes, the files come with you.

Your meetings were always your data.

Now they act like it.