Oris vs Granola, Otter, Fireflies, and MacWhisper
| Oris | |
|---|---|
| Capture | Mic and system audio from your Mac; system audio via Apple’s CoreAudio process tap. No participant joins your call. |
| Transcription | Meetings run on this Mac, through WhisperKit. Oris never sends the audio anywhere. |
| Speaker split | Your mic is labeled “me,” system audio is labeled “others,” from the two recorded tracks. |
| Where notes land | An Obsidian vault, a Markdown folder, or Apple Notes — whichever you already use. |
| Quick capture | A global hotkey records a spoken note from any app, transcribed on-device. |
Oris captures both sides of a call from the Mac itself. Your voice comes through the microphone; everyone else’s comes through system audio via Apple’s CoreAudio process tap. No participant joins your meeting. After you stop, WhisperKit transcribes everything on-device (Oris never sends the audio anywhere for transcription), producing a speaker-labeled result, with your mic labeled “me” and system audio labeled “others.” The summary lands in your chosen destination: as Markdown in an Obsidian vault or any folder of .md files, or as a native note in Apple Notes.
Oris 0.9 added note templates and structured notes (both Pro, free in beta). Templates shape the generated summary, with six built-ins or your own. Structured notes extract decisions and action items from the transcript and anchor each one to a verbatim quote, so every action item traces back to something someone actually said. A menu bar icon lets you start a recording with a chosen template via hotkey; a separate global hotkey captures quick voice notes from any app, transcribed on-device and kept in Oris’s own inbox or sent on to your notes, whichever you choose.
What Oris adds
On top of the capture: note templates, structured notes with verbatim quotes as receipts, a menu bar icon with hotkeys for your templates, and an optional summarization provider you choose (the transcript text goes to that provider; Oris never sends the audio itself anywhere).
Coming from Granola
Granola made the no-bot workflow familiar: the call is captured from your own machine and a note comes out. Oris starts from the same idea and adds two things. Transcription and the speaker split run on your Mac, so Oris never sends the audio anywhere. And the note is written straight to the destination you already use: the Obsidian vault your other notes live in, a Markdown folder your editor opens, or Apple Notes on your Mac.
If you keep a running note on a topic in Obsidian, the Oris plugin can write the meeting summary directly into it, cursor-anchored where you are in the document. The call ends, the note appears in place, and the conversation joins your existing context. For recurring meetings like a weekly one-on-one or a project sync, note templates shape the summary consistently; structured notes extract decisions and action items with verbatim quotes, which is a different kind of artifact than Granola’s enriched notes.
Coming from Otter or Fireflies
Oris records from your own Mac, so nothing joins the call and nothing appears in anyone’s participant list. The recording is part of your own setup, like a notepad on your desk rather than a guest in the meeting, and that is the difference you notice first.
Transcription runs on-device regardless of the platform: Zoom, Teams, Meet, a phone call played through the Mac’s speakers, anything that produces audio on the system. The summary is written on-device by default. If you configure a provider instead (OpenAI, Anthropic, Azure OpenAI, or a self-hosted Ollama instance), the transcript text is sent to that provider to write the summary; Oris still never sends the audio itself anywhere, and an Ollama instance on your own machine keeps the text local as well.
A concrete example is a user-research interview where you want the full transcript plus a structured set of themes. Oris transcribes both sides, runs the Interview / user research template, and extracts notable quotes with speaker label and timestamp. The note is in your vault before you’ve written your debrief. If you’ve been importing Otter transcripts into Obsidian by hand, Oris can also summarize an existing transcript or audio file directly, useful for backfilling older recordings.
Coming from MacWhisper or Superwhisper
MacWhisper and Superwhisper are genuinely good at what they do. Both are built on Whisper, and Oris uses it too (specifically WhisperKit with Whisper large-v3 turbo by default). The difference is scope.
MacWhisper and Superwhisper are transcription-first, in two different shapes: MacWhisper turns audio and video files into text, and Superwhisper turns your voice into text in whatever app you’re typing in. Oris is a meeting recorder with transcription inside it. It captures both sides of a live call, splits them into labeled tracks, runs the summary, and writes a structured note without a manual step between stopping the recording and opening the file.
Superwhisper’s voice-input hotkey has a close analogue in Oris’s Quick Note, a global hotkey from any app, transcribed on-device (WhisperKit by default, with two lighter on-device engines to choose from), landing in Oris’s inbox, your vault, or Apple Notes. If you use Superwhisper mainly for quick captures and want a meeting pipeline alongside it, both can run on the same Mac.
For people who use MacWhisper to transcribe existing audio files, Oris can do that too, running the same transcribe-and-summarize pipeline on an audio file or exported transcript. A reasonable path for backfilling a recording you captured elsewhere.