Google AI Edge Foresight: what it is and how to use it

Google AI Edge Foresight is an experimental Mac app from Google that listens to your meetings and turns your rough bullet points into full notes, with all of the processing done on the laptop. You use it by jotting shorthand during a call or an in-person meeting, then letting the app fill in the details from its own local transcript. Nothing goes to the cloud.

The app showed up with little fanfare on October 6. @9to5mac put it plainly: Foresight "turns scribbles into full notes using offline recordings." A day later, @testingcatalog posted a short demo and noted that the app can link to Google Drive to build a knowledge graph, and that transcription runs on local Gemma 4 models (E4B or 12B).

Where it came from

Foresight is a showcase app for EmbeddingGemma 2, the open embedding model Google released the same day. @sundarpichai called it "our first open, natively multimodal embedding model" and pitched it for offline, privacy-first retrieval when paired with Gemma 4. It has 740 million parameters and maps text, code, images, video and audio into one shared search space, so a typed question can find a moment in an audio recording.

That's the split inside the app. EmbeddingGemma 2 searches your files and transcripts, and Gemma 4 does the writing and answering. Both run on the Mac. Google's developer blog says sensitive data "never leaves your device," and that the app works with any meeting platform, "even completely offline."

What Foresight can do

Per Google's developer blog and the early coverage, the app:

• Listens through system audio and the microphone during video calls or in-room meetings
• Expands the short bullets you type into fuller notes, pulling the details from the transcript
• Shows your own notes beside the AI-generated ones in a split view
• Searches local files and Google Drive (PDFs, Docs, Office files, Markdown, bookmarks) using plain-language questions
• Detects questions asked during the meeting and suggests answers live, a feature Google calls Live Assistance
• Lets you chat with an assistant about your notes and documents afterward

How to use it

Download it from Google's AI Edge Foresight page at developers.google.com/edge/foresight. TechCrunch reports that the FAQ describes it as optimized for Apple Silicon, so an older Intel Mac may struggle. Point it at the folders and Drive files relevant to your work, start a meeting, and type the way you normally would: a name, a number, "follow up on pricing." When the meeting ends, the app turns those fragments into complete notes.

Google has not posted a price. The developer blog says the app has no cloud subscription costs, which makes sense since there are no servers to pay for. It is labeled experimental, so expect rough edges, and don't be surprised if it changes or disappears.

My read

TechCrunch called Foresight a Granola competitor, and the comparison is fair up to a point. Most AI note-takers people use today process your audio on someone else's servers. That's fine for a lot of meetings. It's a problem when you're on a call with a patient, or a client who is reading out their financials. With Foresight, the recording stays on the laptop.

The catch is quality. A model small enough to run on a laptop won't summarize a messy two-hour meeting as well as a frontier model in a data center. I do like the design choice, though: you write down what matters and the AI fills in around your notes, so it has less room to make things up. You'll only know whether the small models are good enough by trying it on your own meetings, with your own accents and people talking over each other.

One practical note for Illinois businesses: the state requires every party's consent to record a private conversation. Running the notes locally doesn't change that. Tell people the app is listening.

What it means for a business

Foresight is a small, experimental app, but the models behind it are open and run on an ordinary Mac. That goes a long way toward answering a common objection from owners: "I can't put client information into ChatGPT." A dental office or an accounting firm could handle meeting notes and document search with a local model, and the data never reaches a vendor.

If you're not sure which of your workflows could run that way, New Face Design's free process audit goes through your week with you, points out the few tasks worth automating, and flags which of them can stay on your own machines.