Frequently asked questions
Short answers to common questions about Folio. How it captures meetings, where your notes live, and what runs on your machine.
Getting started#
Does it join my calls as a bot?
No. Folio never joins your call. It is a menu-bar app that captures the system audio on your Mac through ScreenCaptureKit, so it works with any meeting tool without a participant showing up in the call. There is no bot, no proxy, and no third-party service sitting between you and the people you are talking to.
Do I need an account or API key?
No account is required. Folio works out of the box with on-device transcription, so the local path needs no key and no sign-up. An OpenAI key is only needed if you opt in to the cloud transcription fallback. That fallback is never the default.
How does it know a meeting started?
Folio watches your calendar and your audio devices through EventKit. When a meeting starts it records the system audio and your microphone as two separate streams. There is no Google OAuth and no Microsoft Graph involved.
Privacy and data#
Does my audio ever leave my machine?
Not on the default path. Audio, transcripts, and notes stay on your Mac. The only network calls Folio ever makes are a one-time model-weights download on first use and the opt-in cloud and webhook paths, all of which can be blocked. See the privacy page for the full picture.
Where do my notes go?
Folio writes one markdown file per meeting into a vault path you choose. Each file is plain markdown you can read, edit, search, and back up with any tool. The frontmatter includes attendees, duration, model, and source.
Can I run it offline?
Yes. Privacy Mode, under Settings then Privacy, physically blocks every outbound HTTP call except localhost. After the model weights are downloaded once, the app keeps working end to end with Wi-Fi off.
Is anything encrypted?
Yes. Notes are encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM and Argon2id. There is no telemetry, no analytics, and no crash reporting, and that absence is enforced in CI by a dedicated no-telemetry job.
Platform and pricing#
Which Macs are supported?
Folio runs on macOS 13+, on Apple Silicon or Intel. Apple Silicon is the performance target, where on-device transcription is Metal-accelerated. Intel users build from source.
Is it free and open source?
Yes. Folio is open source under the Apache-2.0 license. You can read the code, the license, and the full project on GitHub.
Is there a Windows or Linux version?
No. Folio is macOS only. It depends on macOS frameworks such as ScreenCaptureKit and EventKit for capture and meeting detection, so there is no Windows or Linux build.
How do I get speaker names?
Folio runs diarization on device, on the system-audio track, and clusters the voices into Speaker 1, Speaker 2, Speaker 3, and so on. Your own microphone track is always labelled You. No cloud is involved in diarization.
Still stuck? Start from the documentation home, or open a question on GitHub issues.