Alder works the same way whether you’re in a meeting room, on a Teams call, or playing back a Voice Memo from your iPhone. This is the whole workflow, end to end — and a plain-English answer to “what does it use, and where does my data go?”
Pick the one that fits the meeting. The rest of the pipeline is identical.
In-person · room mic or AirPods
Press ⌃⌘R from anywhere on your Mac.
A small flame icon lights up in the menu bar. Alder is listening. Speak. Same shortcut to stop. Use your built-in mic, AirPods, a USB mic — whatever sounds best in the room.
Teams · Zoom · Meet
Pick the “Alder Meeting” device, then press ⌃⌘R.
Alder ships a Core Audio aggregate that mixes your mic with the meeting audio — so both sides of the call land in the same file. No bot joins. No one in the meeting sees anything. You hear the meeting normally; Alder just listens too.
iPhone · Voice Memos · WhatsApp · AirDrop
Drag any audio file onto the Alder window.
Voice Memo from a corridor chat? WhatsApp voice note? A 30-min .m4a someone AirDropped you? Drop it in. Alder auto-detects the language and runs the same transcribe + summarise pipeline as a live recording.
You can dictate consent at the start of any recording — Alder will transcribe and preserve it in the note. There is no countdown, no animated dot, no “meeting bot joined the call” banner. It’s up to you to tell the room.
You can keep working — Alder transcribes in the background and notifies you when the note is ready.
Recording
On your Mac
Core Audio writes the file straight to disk inside Alder’s sandbox. Nothing is streamed anywhere. You can pause, stop, and play it back without an internet connection.
Transcription
On your Mac
whisper.cpp runs the OpenAI Whisper model directly on your Mac (Apple Silicon Metal-accelerated, or CPU on Intel). 99 languages, auto-detected. No audio leaves your machine — ever.
Summary
Optional · your API key
If you switch summaries on, Alder sends only the transcript text to the AI provider you choose, using your own API key. Audio is never sent. File names, paths, attendees, timestamps — none of it is sent. Only the text.
Apple Notes
On your Mac
The summary is written into the Apple Notes folder you pick (default: “Alder”). It syncs through your existing iCloud account, same as any other note you’d write yourself.
The note that lands in Apple Notes is structured — Summary, Decisions, Action items, Open questions, Risks. You can edit the prompt that produces it in Settings → Summarisation, so the shape of your notes matches the way you actually run meetings.
There’s also an optional cleanup pass that runs the raw transcript through a small model to add punctuation, capitalisation, and drop the “ums”. Off by default. When you turn it on, only the transcript text is sent — same boundary as the summary step.
Alder uses exactly two AI components. Neither is owned by Alder.
Speech-to-text
Whisper is OpenAI’s open-source transcription model. Alder runs it locally through whisper.cpp, Metal-accelerated on Apple Silicon. You pick the model size (tiny → large) in Settings; bigger models are more accurate, smaller models are faster.
No cloud. Your audio never leaves your Mac. You can transcribe on a plane.
Summarisation · optional
Alder doesn’t ship its own LLM. You bring an API key from whichever provider you already trust. The request is made directly from your Mac to that provider — Alder has no server in the middle.
Anthropic · Claude
Sonnet 4.6 (default), Opus 4.7, Haiku 4.5
Best summaries for most meetings. Sonnet is the cost/quality sweet spot.
OpenAI
GPT-5 family
Pick this if your team already uses OpenAI and you prefer not to add another provider.
Google · Gemini
Gemini 2.5 Pro / Flash
Cheapest per meeting. Useful when you’re processing dozens of recordings a week.
A typical 30-minute meeting summary costs around $0.005 – $0.05 depending on which model you pick. You pay the provider, not Alder.
Alder is a Mac app, not a cloud service. There is no Alder server, no Alder database, no Alder account. The list below is exhaustive — that’s the whole story.
What stays on your Mac
What can leave your Mac
What Alder never sees
Working offline