Shadow

Shadow is a bot-free AI meeting assistant for Mac from Taper Labs, Inc., led by founder and CEO Jay Song. It captures system audio and the microphone on the Mac, so no bot joins the call and nothing appears in the participant list. Autopilot mode detects supported meetings and starts and stops recording on its own. The help center lists Google Meet, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Cisco Webex, GoTo Meeting, Lark, Slack huddles and Discord as supported for automatic detection, and in-person meetings can be recorded too. Transcription and speaker identification run on the Mac, and Smart Screenshots capture the meeting window, so the record holds what was shown as well as what was said.

Every meeting is saved to a folder the user chooses as plain Markdown files: a meeting page with properties, the transcript, notes, any Skill results and a linked page for each person. Shadow builds this vault for AI agents. A SHADOW.md guide file explains the layout, and agents that can read a local folder, such as Claude, OpenAI Codex or OpenClaw, can work across the full meeting history without a connector. Shadow does not offer an MCP server or a connector for browser-based chat apps, and says agents do not need one for local files. The same folder opens as an Obsidian vault and can sync between Macs through iCloud Drive or Google Drive. Meetings stay readable on every plan with no history limit.

Meeting Skills are editable prompts that run on the transcript and screen captures to produce meeting notes, action items, BANT breakdowns, follow-up emails or any other result a user can describe, either on demand or automatically after each meeting when Automate is turned on. Results can be saved as Markdown or sent to a webhook, for example to Zapier, n8n or Make.com. Between calls, Action Skills run from a keyboard shortcut on the user's voice, screen or selected text. Built-in Skills cover Voice Typing, Quick Reply and Refine Text, and users can write their own. Ask answers questions about a meeting, including what was shown on screen. Shadow connects natively to Google Calendar to match recordings with events, and says app context and more integrations are on the way.

Pricing is in US dollars. The Free plan is free forever and includes unlimited transcription, unlimited audio recording and unlimited Smart Screenshots, and every download includes two weeks of Plus with no card required. Plus costs $8/mo billed annually, or $12 billed monthly, and unlocks unlimited AI Meeting Notes, Meeting Skills, Action Skills and AI Chat. Voice Typing and the other Action Skills need Plus or the trial. The pricing page lists no team or enterprise plan.

On privacy, raw audio is not sent to an external transcription service and meetings are stored locally. AI features such as Skills, Ask and automatic meeting titles send the context they need to AI providers, currently OpenAI, Google and Anthropic, through business offerings configured not to train general-purpose models, and Shadow states that meeting content and Skill outputs are never used for model training. Users can keep everything on the Mac by turning those features off. Shadow requires an Apple Silicon Mac with macOS 14.2 or later, Windows is on a waitlist, and there is no mobile app. Its privacy policy says Shadow is not intended for environments that require HIPAA compliance, and no SOC 2 report or trust center is published.

Shadow suits Mac users who want bot-free capture they own as local files, with AI agents or Obsidian reading the archive. Teams that need bot-free meeting notes on Windows, iPhone or Android should consider Granola, and teams that want a web workspace with a mobile app can look at Otter.ai. Procurement teams that require a SOC 2 Type II report should consider Fathom or Fireflies.ai, and organizations that need native CRM sync with Salesforce or HubSpot should evaluate Fireflies.ai or Gong.

Current state Q4 2026: Shadow now leads with its local Markdown vault for AI agents and Obsidian, alongside Action Skills for voice typing and quick replies anywhere on the Mac. Its most recent Product Hunt launch was on May 18, 2026. It publishes no MCP server, saying agents read the vault files directly.