Built for your work
Autorec for journalists
An interview recording is evidence of who told you what. If that file lives on a cloud vendor's servers, the vendor becomes a place a court, a prosecutor, or a hostile party can reach for it, often without telling you. Autorec records the interview on your own machine, so the only copy is the one in your possession.
What makes interview recording different
Source protection is not a feature, it is the job. A reporter who promises a source confidentiality has to be able to keep that promise against a subpoena, and a recording held by a third-party SaaS company is a weak link in that promise. The vendor can be served, and a gag order can stop them from telling you it happened. Reporting also happens away from a desk: a quick call from a parking lot, an interview in a building with no usable wifi, a conversation you need to capture before the moment passes. A recorder that needs a connection to a cloud service to function is a recorder that fails exactly when the story is moving.
Source protection and capture in the field
Autorec keeps the recording, the transcript, and the summary on your own device. There is no vendor account, so there is no third party for anyone to subpoena: a court that wants your interview audio has to come to you, where you and your newsroom's lawyers can see the request and respond to it. Recording and transcription run locally, so Autorec works on airplane mode, on a weak hotel connection, or with no connection at all. The .srt transcript carries timestamps, so pulling an exact quote and citing where in the recording it sits is straightforward when you are writing on a deadline.
Honest framing: keeping audio off third-party servers removes one route to your material, it does not make you subpoena-proof. Your own device can still be compelled or seized, and recording-consent law varies by jurisdiction and is your responsibility to know. Autorec narrows the attack surface to hardware you hold. It is not a legal shield.
The parts that matter for reporting
Nothing leaves your machine
Recording, transcript, and summary are written to your local disk. No upload step, no vendor copy, no telemetry phoning home.
Works without internet
Recording and transcription happen on your machine, so a hotel, a field location, or airplane mode is fine. Nothing depends on a connection.
No bot joins the call
Autorec captures the meeting window from your desktop. No extra participant appears in the attendee list, so nobody on the call sees a recording assistant.
Transcribes on-device
After a call, Autorec runs whisper.cpp locally to produce a text transcript. The audio is never sent anywhere to be transcribed.
Plain .txt and .srt output
Transcripts are written as a .txt file and a timestamped .srt file. Both are standard formats you can open, search, and cite without proprietary software.
Where Autorec will not fit
Autorec records meeting-platform calls from the desktop. It is built around Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet, not in-person interviews or phone calls, so a face-to-face conversation or a regular phone interview is out of scope. It is single-user with no shared newsroom library, there is no mobile app, and macOS is still in development. It runs on Linux and Windows. For protecting the device itself, a reporter handling sensitive material should still use full-disk encryption and the rest of their normal operational security.
Questions journalists ask
Can a court subpoena my interview recordings from Autorec?
Not from Autorec, because there is no vendor holding your files. With a cloud recorder, the company can be served directly and a gag order can keep that quiet. With Autorec the recording is on your own device, so any demand has to come to you, where you and your lawyers can actually respond. Your device itself can still be subject to legal process.
Does Autorec work without internet?
Yes. Recording and on-device transcription run entirely on your machine, so a flaky hotel connection, a basement with no signal, or airplane mode is fine. Nothing about capturing or transcribing the interview depends on being online.
Will the person I'm interviewing see a recording bot?
No. Autorec captures the call window from your desktop and does not appear as a participant. Whether you tell your interviewee they are being recorded is a separate matter of ethics and law, and that is on you.
Can I record an in-person or phone interview with Autorec?
Not really. Autorec is built to record Zoom, Teams, and Google Meet calls from the desktop. For an in-person interview or a standard phone call you would still want a dedicated audio recorder.
Keep your next interview in your own hands
Free for three recordings a day, up to 40 minutes each. Works offline, nothing uploaded.
Download Autorec free