Meeting notes that never leave your machine.

Why it exists

Every meeting tool that writes notes for you does it by sending your meetings to somebody else’s computer. For a lot of conversations — client calls, salary discussions, anything under an NDA — that is the wrong trade, and it is not a trade most people are asked to make consciously.

Halvern does the same job without that step. That constraint is the product.

What it does

The privacy claim, stated precisely

Claims like this are usually vague on purpose, so here is a version you can check in the source.

A downloaded build therefore sends nothing, and cannot be made to send anything without being rebuilt with credentials it does not have.

Each of those is a file you can open, in a repository you can clone — here.

Two features do send data once you configure them: an external summarisation provider, and remote transcription. Both are off until you set them up, and the privacy policy says exactly what each one sends.

What this page collects

A product that promises your meetings stay put should say what its own website does. This one has no analytics script, no cookies and no fingerprinting — nothing runs in your browser to watch you.

This page is served by GitHub Pages, and Download sends you to GitHub Releases, so GitHub’s servers hand you both the page and the file. They log what every web server logs:

Those logs are GitHub’s and we never see them. What we can read is one number, from a public API anyone can call: how many times each release file has been downloaded in total. Not who, not where, not when — a count.

So there is no identifier that follows you between visits, because there is nothing set in your browser to follow you with, and nothing on our side to follow you into. GitHub’s privacy statement covers their half.

Take it

All of it is open source, under the MIT licence. Clone it, read it, change it, fork it, ship your own version, sell that version. There is no part held back and no edition you have to pay for to get the one that works.

That is not generosity, it is the point. Everything above this line asks you to believe something about where your meetings go — and the only reason you should is that you do not have to. Build it yourself from source and the promise stops being a promise.

If you write software, you also sit in meetings you might want recorded. The same afternoon can put you on both sides of that: the person who needs the notes, and the person who can go and check what the thing actually does before trusting it with a client call.

Read the source

Before you download