The AI attendee that reads the room.
Donna joins your Google Meet, records everything on your server, and files the report the sharpest person in your company would write — decisions, receipts, tensions, and what nobody said.
Your VPS. Your API keys. Your data. No per-seat fees, no vendor cloud in the data path.
What is Donna? Donna is a self-hosted AI meeting attendee: she joins Google Meet as a visible participant from your own Linux server, records audio and screen video, transcribes with Whisper large-v3 on your API key, and delivers a meeting-intelligence report — decisions, verbatim commitments, tensions, and power dynamics — analyzed with your own DeepSeek key.
The report — Exhibit A
Notes tell you what was said. Donna tells you what happened.
Every meeting gets a two-pass analysis: first a forensic extraction of every decision, commitment, and tension with quotes and timestamps — then the report itself, written with opinions and receipts. Eight sections, none of which your current notetaker has words for:
Donna's Take
The real story of the meeting in two or three blunt sentences — the subtext everyone will pretend they did not notice.
What Got Decided (And What Didn’t)
Every decision with the tradeoff behind it. Decisions made without discussing a tradeoff get flagged — that silence is a red flag, not a footnote.
The Receipts
Every commitment in the speaker’s exact words with a timestamp. Owner, action, deadline. Vague deadlines (“soon”, “next week”) are flagged as soft.
Where It Got Interesting
Tensions and pushback: who was on each side, how it resolved — or didn’t — and what conceding cost.
What Nobody Said
Open questions that got dodged, topics raised and dropped, and the things someone almost said before pulling back.
Who Moved
Position shifts: who walked in saying one thing and walked out saying another, and what caused the pivot.
The Room Read
Power dynamics. Who ran the meeting versus who ran the conversation; who deferred, who dominated, who got talked over.
Follow-Up (Donna's Orders)
What happens next, who does it, by when. Dodged commitments get pinned down here.
Custody — Exhibit B
Your meetings never leave your building
Runs on your VPS
Your own Linux VPS with nginx + pm2 — no vendor cloud in the data path. The recording pipeline — join, capture, compress — happens entirely on hardware you administer.
Your API keys
Transcription is Whisper large-v3 (via the Groq API, using your own key); analysis is DeepSeek (your own key), two analysis passes. Direct provider relationships — no notetaker middleman holding your audio.
Your database
PostgreSQL on your server; reports as Markdown; recordings on your disk. Retention policy is a command on your own disk, not a plan feature.
Where Donna sits in the market
| Cloud bots Otter · Fireflies · Fathom · tl;dv · MeetGeek | Local listeners Granola · Meetily | Donna | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Joins the call as a participant | Yes | No — captures from your device | Yes — from your server |
| Recordings stay off vendor clouds | No | Mostly | Yes — your disk, your Postgres |
| Attends when you can’t | Yes | No | Yes |
| Report depth | Summary + action items | Transcript + summary | Decisions, receipts, tensions, room read |
| Pricing | Per seat, per month | Free/app pricing | Your server + metered API usage |
Honest detail, competitor by competitor: the full comparisons.
Built for the meetings that matter
Sales calls
CRM notes capture what the rep remembers, which is mostly what the rep said.
Client meetings
Scope creep starts verbally, in a meeting, weeks before it shows up in email.
Team standups
“Almost done” is doing unpaid overtime as a status for work that is 40% done.
One-on-ones
Career asks made quietly in a 1:1 get forgotten by review season — by the manager, never by the report.
Board & leadership meetings
Official minutes are sanitized after the fact; the real decision history lives in nobody’s document.
User research interviews
Notetaking while moderating splits your attention exactly when the user goes off-script — where the insight is.
Questions, answered straight
What exactly is Donna?
Donna is a self-hosted AI meeting attendee: software you run on your own Linux VPS that joins your Google Meet calls as a visible participant, records audio and screen video, transcribes with Whisper large-v3 using your own API key, and delivers an eight-section meeting-intelligence report analyzed by DeepSeek with your key.
How is Donna different from Otter, Fireflies, or Fathom?
Three ways. Custody: those are cloud services that store and process your meetings on their servers; Donna keeps everything on yours. Depth: they produce summaries and action items; Donna reports decisions with their tradeoffs, verbatim commitments with timestamps, tensions, position shifts, and the power dynamics of the room — with real speaker names, not "Speaker 1". Memory: open commitments carry into every new report, so "that's the second week this was promised" is something Donna actually says.
Is my meeting data really private with Donna?
Recordings live on your server’s disk, transcripts and reports in your own PostgreSQL database, and the dashboard behind authentication you configure. The only external calls are the transcription and analysis requests made with API keys you own. No notetaker vendor holds a copy of anything.
Which meeting platforms does Donna support?
Google Meet today, as a live attendee. Donna also ingests uploaded recordings from any source — Zoom exports, phone recordings, past meetings — and runs the same transcription and analysis pipeline on them.
Why is it called Donna?
The name honors the archetype of Donna Paulsen from the TV series Suits: the person who knows everything, notices everything, and says the thing everyone else was avoiding. The software is our attempt to give every team that person. (Donna is a Flocci Technologies product, unaffiliated with the show.)
What does Donna cost?
There is no per-seat subscription. You run Donna on your own VPS and pay your own metered API usage for Whisper transcription and DeepSeek analysis — typically a fraction of multi-seat notetaker plans for a whole team.
Put Donna in your next meeting
Donna deploys onto your own VPS in an afternoon: nginx, pm2, PostgreSQL, your API keys. Early access is open — tell us about your team and we’ll get her a seat at your table.
Request early access