On-device by default, cloud by choice
Most tools make the privacy tradeoff for you. They bundle transcription, summarization, and sync into one hosted service — you accept the whole package or you don’t use the tool. Oris makes a different structural choice — each processing step has its own answer to “where does this run,” and you control it per step.
Because the tradeoff is granular, you can make an informed decision at each stage rather than trusting a vendor’s blanket privacy statement or rejecting the tool entirely.
Here’s the actual accounting.
Transcription runs on your Mac
When Oris records a meeting, it captures both sides of the call — your microphone and the system audio coming through your speakers. After the call ends, transcription happens on-device using a local speech model. The audio files and the raw transcript stay on your machine.
This isn’t a privacy marketing claim with small-print exceptions. It’s a consequence of the architecture. There’s no upload step. The model runs locally. Your recordings sit in a folder on your Mac alongside the Markdown notes that land in your notes folder (Obsidian or any .md directory you point Oris at).
Summarization runs locally by default
Summarization is the step where a language model reads the transcript and produces structured notes — action items, decisions, context. By default, this runs entirely on-device, using a local model configured in Settings — no transcript text leaves your Mac unless you choose otherwise. If you want higher-quality output and are comfortable with a cloud provider, you can opt in and bring your own API key there.
When you do, the transcript goes to your account at your chosen provider, under your terms of service. Oris doesn’t proxy it through any intermediate server. The request goes directly from your Mac to the API endpoint you configured. Your account, your provider.
If you add no cloud key, Oris still summarizes on-device by default — no transcript text leaves your Mac. To skip summarization entirely, turn it off in Settings; then you get the transcript and nothing more.
“Bring your own key” isn’t a pricing strategy here. It’s the mechanism by which you decide whether any text leaves your Mac at all, and if it does, where it goes and under whose terms.
The choice is yours per step
A lot of tools in this space are fully cloud or fully local. Fully cloud is convenient but opaque about where audio and text actually go. Fully local is private but constrained by what runs well on consumer hardware today.
The per-step model sidesteps that binary. Transcription quality from local models is good enough that it makes sense as the default. Summarization quality from frontier cloud models is meaningfully better than what runs locally right now, but that gap is a tradeoff worth making consciously, not by default.
Different people land in different places. Some run everything locally because the data is sensitive. Some connect their own API key because they already pay for a provider and trust it. Some use a local model for summarization and accept the quality difference. All of these are valid configurations. Oris’s job is to not make that call for you.
What leaves your device is transcript text, if you’ve configured a cloud API key for summarization. What Oris never uploads is the audio, the recordings themselves, and the Markdown notes in your folder — they land wherever you’ve pointed Oris to put them, which stays on your machine unless you’ve synced that folder yourself. That’s the full accounting.