Google launches offline AI Edge Foresight note-taking app for Mac

Google launched AI Edge Foresight for Mac on Oct. 6. The experimental meeting companion transcribes conversations, expands shorthand notes and searches private files with AI models running locally. The downloadable app is designed to work without a cloud connection.

Google says this local design keeps meeting audio, transcripts, notes and files used by the app’s retrieval features on the Mac rather than sending them to a cloud service for processing. That can reduce the exposure of sensitive meeting and document content to cloud infrastructure. However, the sources reviewed for this story did not include an independent privacy or network-traffic audit. They also did not specify telemetry behavior, retention and deletion controls, encryption at rest or the precise macOS permissions the app requests.

Foresight connects to macOS system audio and the microphone, which Google says allows it to work with any meeting platform and in-person conversations. During a meeting, users can enter shorthand notes and have the app fill in details retrieved from the live transcript. Foresight can also detect questions and generate answers from the transcript and other material in a personal knowledge library.

The library can include images, documents, transcripts and notes. Users can search it with natural-language queries, with retrieval performed on the device. Google says transcription, note enhancement and local search remain available offline.

Foresight also showcases EmbeddingGemma 2 and Gemma 4. Google says EmbeddingGemma 2 converts text, images, audio and video into numerical representations in a shared space, allowing the app to retrieve semantically related material across file types. Gemma 4 provides the contextual reasoning used to turn retrieved material into answers and fuller notes. DataPhoenix previously covered Google’s release of EmbeddingGemma 2 for on-device multimodal search.

Google describes EmbeddingGemma 2 as a 740-million-parameter model built on the Gemma 4 architecture and released under the Apache 2.0 license. Foresight shows how its multimodal retrieval can work alongside a generative model in a local application.

The app remains experimental. The opened sources do not specify minimum macOS requirements, supported transcription languages, a complete list of file formats or systematic results for transcript accuracy, speaker separation, battery use and performance in long meetings.