Marketing and PR agencies
Client call notes agency teams keep on their own Macs
Ghosty Notes records the call through your Mac audio, writes the transcript on the device, and leaves the client looking at a participant list with only people in it.
Ghosty Notes runs on macOS on a Mac with Apple Silicon, and Intel Macs are not supported because the speech model runs on the device.
no notetaker in this list
what the other side sees while you record
Agency calls are performances. A new-business pitch, a quarterly review, a crisis call with a client legal team: the people on the other side are watching who is in the room and what is being captured. Most AI notetakers can now capture that room from a desktop app with nothing joining the participant list, and every one of them still sends the client call to its own servers to be transcribed.
That upload is a conversation you did not plan to have. Someone asks which company holds the recording, how long they keep it, who else can ask them for it and whether it can be turned off, and now the first three minutes of your pitch are about your vendor stack instead of their brand. On a call with a regulated client, or one whose comms team has its own policy on recording, the question does not end in three minutes.
Ghosty Notes takes the recording from your Mac system audio. Nothing joins the meeting, and speech becomes text through a model running on your machine, so the audio of the client call never reaches anyone else. The notes land as plain markdown files in a folder you choose, which means the account file for a client is a folder you can zip and hand over, not rows in a service you would have to export from.
An agency records more conversations with companies it does not work for than with clients it does
Start with the pitch. An agency in a competitive process runs discovery calls, a chemistry meeting and a presentation with a prospect, and then loses. The relationship ends. The recording does not. Somewhere in a vendor account sits an hour of that company explaining its market position, its budget, what it thinks of its incumbent agency and what it is worried about. It belongs to a business that never became your client, never signed anything with you beyond an NDA, and has no idea your notetaker was party to the conversation. Over a year of new business, the losses outnumber the wins, so most of what an agency has recorded is other people’s confidential strategy.
Then look across the roster. Agencies serve competing brands, sometimes in the same category, usually with walls between the teams that handle them. Those walls are built out of who sits where, who is on which channel and who has access to which drive. A single cloud notetaker account cuts straight through all of it, because search does not respect a team boundary. The question a client procurement team asks is not whether you would look. It is whether you could. With one archive covering every account, the honest answer is yes, and that is a difficult sentence to put in an RFP response.
The bot in the participant list used to be how this showed up in the room, and it is worth being accurate about that now: Fathom, Fireflies and Otter all record from a desktop app with nothing joining. The awkward moment has gone. What has not changed is where the audio goes, which is to the vendor, bot or no bot. If your client contract names subprocessors, or obliges you to disclose third parties who handle client information, a notetaker is a party you have to be able to name, and removing its icon from the screen does not remove it from that list.
This is also being tested in court. In re Otter.AI Privacy Litigation, case 5:25-cv-06911, was filed in the Northern District of California on 15 August 2025. It is a filed case, nothing about its outcome has been decided and no party has been found liable, so treat it as evidence that practice in this category is under scrutiny rather than as a finding against anyone.
Recording on the device changes the shape of all of this. A lost pitch leaves a file on the machine of whoever attended, which you can delete. An account team holds its own recordings and nobody else’s, so the wall between two competing brands is the same wall you already have. There is no vendor account to name in an RFP, no retention setting a third party controls, and nothing to export if a prospect asks what you still hold on them. You still have to tell people you are recording, and in some places you must, so keep doing that.
- In re Otter.AI Privacy Litigation, 5:25-cv-06911 (N.D. Cal.)
- Filed 15 August 2025. A filed case in this category. No outcome has been decided and no party has been found liable.
- Fathom, Fireflies and Otter product documentation, checked September 2026
- All three now document capture from a desktop app with no bot joining the meeting. All three still send the audio to their own servers for processing.
How it fits an agency week
The new-business pitch
You are on Zoom, Meet or Teams with four people from the prospect and two from your side. Start the recording from the menu bar before the call opens. Nobody joins, nobody asks what the extra attendee is, and the pitch starts on the work.
The brief that changes mid-call
A client redefines the campaign in passing at minute forty and nobody writes it down. Afterwards the transcript is a markdown file with the exact wording, so the change goes into the scope note as what they actually said rather than what your account manager remembers.
The handover to the team who was not on the call
The notes are files in a folder, one per meeting. Drop the relevant file into the campaign folder, paste the summary into the brief, or send it. There is no shared library, so passing a note to a colleague is you passing a file.
Prep for the next client review
Point Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor at the MCP server and ask what this client asked for over the last quarter. It reads your own local notes and answers from them. That works on the free tier over your whole local history.
What agencies ask before they switch
- We need one searchable library the whole account team can reach. Does this do that?
- No, and you should not buy it for that. There is no shared library, no admin console, no seat management and no way for one person to search another person's meetings. Every note lives on the machine of the person who recorded it. A studio can buy several individual licences, but that gives you several separate note collections, not one team archive. If a central searchable record across the account team is the requirement, a cloud tool answers it and this does not.
- Does recording without a visible attendee mean we can record clients without telling them?
- No. Recording rules depend on where the people on the call are, and in a number of places you need consent from some or all parties. Recording without a visible attendee removes an awkward moment, not your obligation to say you are recording. Keep asking, and keep the answer in the file.
- Half our team is on Windows.
- Then half your team cannot use this. It runs on macOS on a Mac with Apple Silicon. Intel Macs are not supported either, because the on-device speech model needs the Apple Silicon hardware. Agencies often split Mac for creative and Windows for finance and media buying, and only the Mac side can run it.
- Can we tell a client, in writing, that their call is not going to a vendor?
- You can describe the architecture, which is the honest version. Audio is captured and transcribed on the Mac and never leaves the device on any tier. If the person recording turns on Pro hosted models for summaries or cross-meeting chat, the transcript text goes to that service, never the audio. In fully local mode nothing is sent. We do not hold certifications and we will not claim any.
- Who speaks in the transcript? Our calls have six people on them.
- Speaker identification is a Pro feature and it runs on your Mac like everything else. On the free tier you get the transcript without speaker labels, which on a six-way client call is a real limitation worth knowing about before you download it.
- We already pay for Fireflies across the agency. Why change?
- If the shared library is doing work for you, do not change. Fireflies records from its desktop app without joining the meeting now, so the visible attendee is not the difference between us. Their desktop mode still sends the call to Fireflies to be transcribed and keeps the result in their account. The case for switching is narrow and specific: client contracts where naming a third party who receives the client call is a problem.
Against the notetakers agencies actually shortlist
| Ghosty Notes | Alternatives | |
|---|---|---|
| Bot-free recording | Same. Recording comes from your Mac system audio | Fathom, Fireflies and Otter all offer it from their desktop apps now |
| Where speech becomes text | On your Mac, on every tier | On the vendor servers, bot or no bot |
| Third party receiving the client call | None in local mode. Pro hosted models receive transcript text only, never audio | Yes, the notetaker vendor |
| Shared library across the account team | No. Notes are files on the recorder's own machine | Yes, with team plans and admin controls |
| Where the notes end up | Markdown files in a folder you pick | In the vendor account, exported when you need them |
| Cost per person | Free tier, or Pro at $5.00 a month or $54.00 a year | Per seat, usually with a team minimum |
| Reading past calls from an AI tool you already use | MCP server on the free tier, reading your local notes | Depends on the vendor plan and its export |
Questions from agency teams
- Does the client ever see that I am recording?
- Not from the meeting software. No attendee joins and no recording banner comes from us. That is exactly why you should tell them yourself at the top of the call, and in a number of jurisdictions you have to.
- What gets sent anywhere if I turn on Pro hosted models?
- The transcript text, and only the transcript text. Audio never leaves your Mac on any tier. Hosted models are the option behind Pro summaries and fast cross-meeting chat, and if you leave everything local nothing is sent at all. Cloud calendar sync with Google or Outlook is also Pro, and that sends calendar event details, not meeting content.
- What hardware do I need?
- A Mac with Apple Silicon. Intel Macs are not supported, because the speech model runs on the Apple Silicon hardware rather than on a server. Any Apple Silicon Mac works.
- Can our five account directors share notes with each other?
- Only by sending files. There is no shared library and no central admin. Each person has their own notes on their own Mac, and sharing one means sending the markdown file the way you would send a document.
- Does it work on Zoom, Google Meet, Teams and a phone call?
- It records the audio your Mac is playing and hearing, so the meeting platform does not matter. A dial-in on speaker, a Zoom pitch and a Teams review are the same job to it.
- Can I ask my AI tool what a client said three months ago?
- Yes, through the MCP server, which is on the free tier. It is a local process that reads the notes on your disk and sends nothing anywhere by itself. The AI app you point at it then receives whatever text it asks for, so a hosted assistant like Claude or ChatGPT sees those excerpts. That is the same trade you make when you paste a document into a chat.
- Are the notes locked into your format?
- No. They are markdown files in a folder you choose. Open them in any editor, keep them in the client folder, put them under version control, delete them. Pro adds Obsidian sync if that is where your agency wiki lives.
- What happens to a client file if we stop paying?
- The files stay where they are, because they were always on your disk. Dropping from Pro to free removes hosted models, cloud calendar sync, speaker identification and Obsidian sync. It does not touch a note you already have.
Record your next client call without a bot in the room
Free tier: on-device transcription, unlimited meetings, the MCP server and local Apple Calendar detection. Pro is $5.00 a month or $54.00 a year.
Download free for Mac