Every week I used to drop the same thing into a cloud service: a recording of a client call, a founder sync, a messy brainstorm. A bot joined, transcribed, and summarized it. Convenient. But at some point I asked myself where those transcripts actually live.

What a meeting transcript really contains

A transcript is more than notes. It holds pricing discussions, unreleased product plans, hiring opinions, client complaints, and sometimes health or legal details someone mentioned in passing. It is a searchable record of everything said, attributed by name.

When a cloud bot such as Otter or Fireflies joins your call, that audio and text are uploaded to someone else's servers. Depending on the plan and settings, they may be retained, indexed, used to improve models, or shared with workspace admins.…