Google AI Edge Foresight: Offline AI for meeting notes on Mac

AI that runs locally and keeps all data on the device is supposed to be Apple's promise. Now Google has released a Mac app built around that same claim. Google AI Edge Foresight is an experimental meeting assistant that runs entirely on the device. It captures microphone input and system audio, allowing it to work with any meeting platform, even without an internet connection if desired.

How does it work in practice? During a meeting, users jot down brief bullet points, and Foresight expands them into detailed notes using the ongoing transcript. The app also detects questions raised in the meeting and provides relevant answers by searching a personal knowledge base of documents, images, transcripts and notes using natural language. According to Google, all transcript and audio processing takes place on the device, with no cloud subscription required.

Powered by EmbeddingGemma 2

Foresight combines Google DeepMind's new EmbeddingGemma 2 model with the Gemma 4 language model. Embedding models do not generate text. Instead, they convert content into numerical vectors so that similar material can be retrieved. The second generation places text, code, images, video frames and audio in the same vector space. This allows a search term to locate a specific moment in a recording without first generating image descriptions or a transcript. The model has 740 million parameters, uses the Gemma 4 architecture and is available under the Apache 2.0 license, allowing developers to freely integrate it into their own apps.

Google also provides a performance figure that may interest Mac users: processing an image on the M5 Pro's GPU takes 37.3 ms, equivalent to just under 27 images per second. Image processing is considered the most computationally demanding part of the workload, and Google says it has specifically optimized this process.

A showcase with potential

Foresight is primarily a showcase for developers, and Google itself describes it as an experimental app. Still, it offers an interesting alternative for people who hold confidential meetings and would prefer not to entrust their transcripts to a cloud service. Google has not said whether transcription works equally well for meetings held in languages other than English, although it does demonstrate image search in the companion AI Edge Gallery app using German search terms.