Shadow
Shadow is a macOS app that captures meetings without ever joining as a bot, transcribes them on your own device, then runs editable prompts called Skills on whatever you said, saw or read on screen.
What is Shadow?
Shadow is a macOS application published by Taper Labs, a Korean company that previously built an asynchronous messaging tool called Tape before pivoting to meeting management. Its argument is that the keyboard and mouse were designed for action, and that action is now the machine's job: Shadow is meant to sit alongside you, watching the screen and listening to the room, waiting to be told what to make of it.
The product has three surfaces. Meetings covers everything that happens around a call. Shadow starts and stops with the conversation on its own, transcribes every word, labels speakers in real time, and finds the meeting window, whether it is Zoom, a Slack Huddle or anything else, to capture what is being shown. The defining choice is that it never joins the call as a bot: no participant is notified, no visible attendee appears, and the dynamic of the meeting is left alone. Actions covers the rest of the Mac. A keyboard shortcut on any screen captures your voice, the active window or the text you have selected, and returns a result pasted at the cursor or shown in an overlay. Voice typing and quick replies are the headline uses; the company claims speech is roughly four times faster than typing.
Both surfaces run on the same object, the Skill. A Skill is simply a prompt, paired with what Shadow should capture and where the answer should go, whether that is the cursor, an overlay, a Markdown file or a webhook. Every built-in Skill is editable and you can write new ones in plain language, with no code.
Privacy is the second pillar. Transcription and speaker separation happen entirely on your Mac, audio never leaves the device for that purpose, and meetings are stored locally. AI features call out to third-party models only when you trigger them, and can be switched off entirely. The vendor states plainly that meeting content and Skill outputs are never used to train models. Around one hundred languages are supported, with English handled best. Shadow runs on macOS alone; Windows is a waiting list.
What it does
- Records and transcribes your meetings automatically, without ever appearing in the call as a participant
- Detects and labels each speaker in real time, so you know who said what
- Finds the meeting window on its own and captures what was shown on screen, not only what was said
- Runs a chosen Skill the instant a call ends: meeting notes, a BANT breakdown, action items or a follow-up email
- Turns speech into clean written text anywhere on the Mac, triggered by a keyboard shortcut
- Answers questions about a past meeting, including questions about what was displayed during it
- Saves results as Markdown files or pushes them onward to Zapier, n8n and Make through a webhook
When to use Shadow / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if Shadow is the right fit.
When to use Shadow
- Mac users running back-to-back client calls who cannot let a visible recording bot join the room
- Sales, customer success and recruiting teams who want a BANT breakdown or a follow-up email the moment a call ends
- Consultants, venture investors and user researchers working under NDA, where a bot in the meeting is a dealbreaker
- People who would rather write their own prompt than accept a vendor's fixed summary format
- Anyone capturing in-person meetings or Slack Huddles, which conventional meeting bots cannot reach at all
When not to use Shadow
- Windows, Linux, iOS and Android users: Shadow ships for macOS only, and everything else is a waiting list
- Teams that need shared server-side transcripts, since nothing is stored on Shadow's servers and there is no cross-device sync
- Healthcare organisations handling patient records, which the vendor places outside Shadow's scope explicitly
- Buyers whose procurement demands a data processing agreement, a SOC 2 report or a named EU representative, none of which Shadow publishes
- Very high-volume users, whose accounts may be throttled or suspended above five times the average paid usage
How to use Shadow
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Download the macOS application from the download page and install it on your Mac
- Create an account, which requires you to be at least 18 years old
- Claim the two free weeks of the Plus plan, which need no credit card
- Grant the system permissions Shadow needs: microphone and system audio, screen capture, and calendar access
- Connect your calendar so that Autopilot can detect meetings and start on its own
- Pick a Meeting Skill to run automatically when a call ends, such as meeting notes or a follow-up email
- Assign a keyboard shortcut to the Action Skills you expect to use most, such as voice typing
- Open a Skill from anywhere with quick access, or search across all of them when you forget the shortcut
- Edit any Skill by changing three things: the prompt, what Shadow captures, and where the output lands
- Route results where you work: paste at the cursor, save a Markdown file, or send them to Zapier, n8n or Make
Pros & Cons
Pros
- No bot ever appears in the call, so clients and colleagues are never notified and the meeting keeps its natural shape
- Transcription and speaker separation run on your own Mac, and the vendor states that content is never used to train models
- Every prompt is editable, which is unusual in a category built on fixed, non-negotiable summary formats
- It captures what is shown on screen, not only what is spoken, which matters for demos, slides and charts
- It works beyond video calls: in-person meetings, Slack Huddles and any application on the Mac
- The free plan is genuinely useful, with unlimited transcription, recording and smart screenshots
- The paid entry point is low at USD 8 per month, with two weeks of trial and no credit card required
Cons
- macOS only, with no Windows, Linux or mobile version and no committed date for any of them
- No sync between devices and no vendor-side backup, so content deleted locally is gone for good
- No postal address, no contact page and no about page are published anywhere on the site
- No data processing agreement, no Article 27 representative and no security certification such as SOC 2 or ISO 27001
- Explicitly outside the scope of healthcare privacy rules, and the integrated model APIs are not certified for patient data
- No documented control to exclude your data from model training: the vendor presents non-training as a default state rather than a setting you own
- Only English is genuinely optimised, despite roughly one hundred languages being supported
Pricing & Plans
Shadow offers a permanently free plan alongside a single published paid tier. The free plan costs nothing and includes unlimited transcription, unlimited audio recording and unlimited smart screenshots. The lowest paid entry point is the Plus plan at USD 8.00 per month when billed annually, rising to USD 12.00 per month on month-to-month billing. New users receive two weeks of Plus at no charge, without providing a credit card. All amounts are quoted in US dollars and exclude any applicable sales, VAT or similar taxes.
- Free — USD 0
- forever — unlimited transcription
- unlimited audio recording and unlimited smart screenshots
- Plus — USD 8 per month billed annually
- or USD 12 per month billed monthly — everything in Free
- plus unlimited Action Skills
- unlimited AI meeting notes
- unlimited Meeting Skills and unlimited AI chat
- Enterprise — no published price — additional privacy controls to keep sensitive meeting data inside internal networks
- arranged on request through support
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how Shadow handles your data.
GDPR overview
Shadow devotes a dedicated section of its privacy policy to the GDPR, and it is more substantial than most. Taper Labs identifies itself as controller and processor, sets out four lawful bases for processing (consent, performance of a contract, legitimate interests and compliance with law), and undertakes to cover transfers outside the European Economic Area with standard contractual clauses approved by the European Commission or with binding corporate rules. Data subject rights are listed individually: access, correction, restriction, objection, portability in CSV, erasure and the right to complain to a supervisory authority. Deleting your account erases personal data within fourteen days. Two gaps deserve mention: no representative is designated under Article 27, and no data protection officer is named, the privacy contact being simply Jay Song. The policy took effect on 3 August 2026.
Who owns the data?
Your content stays yours. The terms state that everything you upload, submit or generate through the service remains your property, or the property of the third parties who licensed it to you. Taper Labs takes only a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to use, store and process that content in order to provide, maintain and improve the service. In practice very little reaches the vendor at all: transcripts, screen captures and Skill outputs are held on your own Mac and are never stored on Shadow's servers. Two caveats deserve attention. Stripe acts as an independent controller for payment data, and your information would follow the company into any acquisition or bankruptcy.
Reuse rights
You may reuse anything you produce with Shadow without asking permission. The files are yours and they sit on your own disk: transcripts and Skill outputs save as plain Markdown, and you are free to push them to a webhook, paste them into any application, publish them or delete them outright. Nothing in the terms restricts the commercial reuse of your own output. The restrictions run the other way, against the service rather than the content. You may not resell, sublicense or commercially exploit Shadow itself, reverse-engineer it, scrape it with automated tools, or use it to benchmark or assemble information for a competing product. One duty travels with the content: obtaining consent from every participant before you record, transcribe or share a conversation is your responsibility alone.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
Most of what Shadow handles is never hosted anywhere: transcripts, screen captures and Skill outputs stay on your Mac, and the privacy policy states plainly that the company does not store user content on its servers. What the company does hold, meaning account details, payment records, diagnostic and usage data, is stored or processed in the United States and South Korea, or wherever its partners and providers maintain facilities. The website itself is served from Amazon infrastructure resolving to a United States address. Transfers out of the European Economic Area are covered by standard contractual clauses approved by the European Commission, by binding corporate rules or by other legally accepted means. There is no data residency option: you cannot choose a region, and no European-only hosting is offered. Content sent to model providers when you run a Skill is processed under those providers' own terms, on business tiers configured not to train general-purpose models.
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting Shadow.
- Consent is entirely on you: eleven US states require every participant to agree before recording, several more operate mixed regimes, and the vendor disclaims all responsibility for your compliance
- A tool that listens and watches continuously normalises the silent recording of colleagues and clients, and the people around you may never learn it was running
- Local storage with no backup cuts both ways: a deleted transcript, an erased disk or a lost Mac takes the record with it, permanently
- Letting AI write every set of notes gradually erodes the attention and recall you would otherwise bring to a conversation, and the habit is hard to reverse
- Privacy is genuine but partial: the moment you run a Skill, transcripts, screen captures, notes and calendar events travel to OpenAI, Google or Anthropic
- AI output can be inaccurate or misleading, and the terms make you solely responsible for reviewing anything before you act on it or send it onward
- Disputes fall under Korean law before the Seoul Central District Court, and liability is capped at what you paid over twelve months, which is a modest remedy for a confidential recording gone wrong
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Easy. You install a macOS application, create an account and grant three system permissions: microphone and system audio, screen recording, and calendar access. There is no server to configure, no extension to install and no code to write, since a Skill is a prompt in plain language. Two optional steps take slightly more thought: assigning keyboard shortcuts to the Skills you use most, and pasting a webhook URL if you want results delivered to Zapier, n8n or Make. Most users should be capturing their first meeting within a few minutes.
Deployment
Integrations
Supported languages
Behind Shadow
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Alternatives
Tools that compete with or complement Shadow.
Frequently asked questions
Does Shadow join my meetings as a bot?
Which platforms does Shadow run on?
How private is my data, really?
Does Shadow train AI models on my content?
What exactly is a Skill?
What does Shadow cost?
Do I need permission from the other participants?
How do I delete my data?
Does Shadow sync across my devices?
How many languages does it support?
Should you pick Shadow?
Shadow answers a narrow question convincingly: how do you get an AI record of a meeting without putting a robot in the room? Its response is to stay entirely on your Mac, transcribing and separating speakers on the device, capturing the screen alongside the audio, and never announcing itself to anyone else on the call. For consultants under NDA, recruiters, investors and anyone whose calls would be changed by a visible bot, that is a real and specific advantage rather than a marketing line.
The second idea is arguably the more interesting one. By making every output a Skill, that is a prompt you can open and rewrite, Shadow refuses the fixed summary template that defines most of this category. Meeting notes, a BANT breakdown, a follow-up email or something no vendor has thought of are all the same object, and you can build the last one yourself without writing code.
The costs are equally clear. This is a macOS product and nothing else, with no sync, no server-side copy and no backup, which makes local deletion permanent and rules out any shared team library. Corporate governance is light for a tool that listens to confidential conversations: no published address, no data processing agreement, no security certification, no EU representative, and terms that place every dispute before a court in Seoul. Healthcare work is explicitly out of scope.
Read it, then, as an excellent individual instrument rather than a company-wide platform. At USD 8 per month, with a generous free tier and a two-week trial that asks for no card, an individual professional on a Mac can judge it quickly and cheaply. A procurement team with a compliance checklist will run out of boxes to tick long before the product runs out of merit.
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