For professionalsLawyers · Journalists · Consultants · Researchers

If your conversations stay in the room, your recordings should too.

Client calls, source interviews, engagement notes, field research. Riffado turns the voice recorder you already carry into a transcript archive that runs on hardware you control, transcribed by AI that answers to you, readable by no one you haven't chosen.

Plan an on-premises setupRead the source

Works with the Plaud Note family today: Note, Note Pro, and NotePin. More recorders are on the roadmap.

The control model

Who holds your words, step by step.

For professional work, we recommend an on-premises deployment with local AI. We can help you plan and set it up on infrastructure you control. One step still involves a party you didn't choose, and it's the one you already live with.

  1. 01

    Capture

    Your recorder uploads to your Plaud account, exactly as it does today. Riffado changes nothing about how you record.

    Your recorder → Plaud
  2. 02

    Sync

    Riffado signs into your Plaud account and pulls each new recording down. From this step on, nothing depends on anyone else's cloud.

    You
  3. 03

    Storage

    Audio and transcripts land on your own disk, or in a bucket you own: Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2, or AWS S3.

    You
  4. 04

    Transcription

    Whisper runs free in your browser, or Ollama and LM Studio run on your hardware. The audio never leaves the building.

    You
  5. 05

    Summaries

    A local model keeps everything in-house. Or plug in a cloud provider you picked, under your account, your key, your terms.

    You
  6. 06

    Export

    Every transcript in one file: TXT, SRT, VTT, or JSON. Plus a full backup archive. Leaving is a feature, not a negotiation.

    You

Riffado with local AI adds no new third party after your recorder. Prefer a cloud model for speed or quality? Plug in OpenAI or Groq under your own account, and the ledger changes at exactly one step, by your decision.

In practice

Set it up once. Then it's just your mornings.

You don't need to become your own infrastructure team. We can configure Riffado, storage, and local AI on your hardware, then leave you with a workflow built for daily use.

  1. 01

    Record like you already do.

    The recorder in the meeting, the interview, the glovebox. Your capture habits don't change, and the official app keeps working alongside Riffado.

  2. 02

    Transcripts appear without ceremony.

    Riffado syncs new recordings in the background. Transcribe free with Whisper in your browser, or point it at Ollama on your own machine and let it run unattended.

  3. 03

    Find the sentence. Cite the minute.

    Search every word you've ever recorded. Player and transcript sit side by side with timestamps intact, and any recording exports as text or subtitles.

Who this is for

Different obligations. Same architecture.

Lawyers

Client meetings, dictation, matter notes. Run Riffado on office hardware with local transcription, and no new vendor enters the picture between your recorder and your archive. When a client asks where recordings of their matter live, the answer is one sentence: on our machines.

Journalists

Interviews come with promises attached. With local transcription, no transcription service ever holds the tape: the recording syncs to your laptop and the AI runs there too. Search years of interviews without putting a source's voice in someone else's cloud.

Consultants

Engagement notes and client workshops, searchable across every project. When an NDA or a security questionnaire asks where client data goes, you can describe the whole path -- your server, your storage, your model -- without a single “it depends.”

Researchers

Participant interviews often come with commitments about where recordings will live. Self-hosting lets you keep those commitments literally: one machine, one storage location, transcription that runs on it. Simple to describe in a data-management plan, simple to verify.

None of this makes compliance automatic. What it makes is a setup simple enough to describe truthfully, which is where every real confidentiality story starts.

Honest boundaries

What we don't claim.

You'll be asked hard questions about your setup. Here are the answers we won't dress up.

No compliance certifications.
Riffado is not HIPAA or SOC 2 certified, and we won't pretend otherwise. The meaningful claims belong to your setup: your hardware, your AI provider's terms, your policies. We give you the knobs; you own the compliance story.
Capture still passes through Plaud.
Your recorder uploads to Plaud's servers before Riffado can sync it. That's how the device works today, with or without us. Once a recording syncs, it lives on storage you control and never depends on Plaud's servers again.
Cloud AI means a cloud provider.
If you point transcription at OpenAI or Groq instead of a local model, that provider processes your audio under your account and their terms. Browser Whisper and Ollama exist precisely so you don't have to.
Hosted means trusting us.
On Hosted Pro, we operate the storage. It's encrypted at rest and you can export everything at any time, but the trust boundary is us, and we'd rather say so than let you assume otherwise. For maximum control, self-host.
Don't take our word for any of this.
Every line of Riffado is AGPL-3.0 on GitHub. Read it, audit it, or hand it to someone who audits things for a living. The page you're on has to be honest because the code can be checked against it.

On-premises, without the setup burden

Keep control of the infrastructure. Let us handle the setup.

We can help deploy Riffado on hardware you control, connect your storage and local AI, and prepare the recorder-to-transcript workflow for your practice, newsroom, consultancy, or lab.

Setup with the Riffado team

An on-premises deployment shaped around your constraints.

  • Hardware and deployment planning
  • Storage and local AI configuration
  • Recorder sync and export workflow
  • A clear handoff your team can understand

Start with one email.

Three things make the first reply useful:

  1. What must stay in-house: recordings, transcripts, the AI, or all three.
  2. What you already run, if anything: hardware, storage, an existing server.
  3. How your team records today: devices and roughly how many people.
Email us about your setup

Two other ways to run Riffado

Prefer to deploy it yourself?

Riffado is free and open source, with a one-command Docker installer. It's the same deployment we'd set up for you, done at your own pace.

Read the self-host guide

Want us to run it instead?

Hosted Pro runs the same open-source code, with encrypted storage and full export whenever you want to move.

Start a 14-day trial