Shadow
A bot-free AI meeting assistant for Mac that listens to your calls and writes the notes, without ever showing up as a visible participant.
🔗 Visit Shadow
Description
Imagine having someone quietly sit in on every meeting you take, write it all down, and never once say a word or show up in the guest list — that's what Shadow does for your Mac. It listens to your meetings, whatever app you're using, and turns them into notes and to-do lists automatically, without the awkwardness of an obvious recording bot joining the call.
Shadow is a macOS-native, bot-free AI meeting assistant that detects meetings at the operating-system level and captures audio plus on-screen visuals across Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Webex, Slack huddles and Discord, without ever appearing as a visible participant. It exports notes to Markdown, Obsidian or webhooks, offers customizable automation "Skills," and processes everything locally on the device — Shadow states it does not train models on user data.
💬 Our review
The short version: if you're on video calls all day and hate writing your own notes afterward, Shadow does it invisibly and it's one of the cheapest paid tiers in the category — but it only runs on a Mac.
Compared to bot-based recorders like Fathom or Fireflies.ai, which visibly join the call as a named participant, Shadow's OS-level capture is a genuinely different approach that avoids the "why is there a robot in my meeting" moment some clients and colleagues find off-putting. At $8/month, the Plus tier undercuts most of the category's paid pricing, and the local-first architecture (audio stays on-device, no training on user data) is a real privacy differentiator versus cloud-processing competitors. The honest caveat: macOS-only means Windows users have zero option here, and as a newer entrant it doesn't yet have the multi-year track record of Otter.ai or Fireflies.
💰 Pricing
📊 Global score
🤖 AI-enriched data
Free tier: unlimited transcription, recording and smart screenshots, plus a 2-week trial of Plus features. Plus: $8/month for unlimited AI meeting notes, Skills and AI chat.
Pros
Never joins as a visible bot — fully invisible OS-level capture
Local-first: audio and data stay on-device, no training on user data
Works across Zoom/Teams/Meet/Slack/Discord without per-platform setup
$8/month is cheap for the category
Cons
macOS only — no Windows or Linux version
Newer entrant vs established players like Otter.ai and Fireflies
Full feature set requires the Plus tier once the trial ends