LUCI records your screen, transcribes the audio, and makes every moment searchable — with the network cable unplugged. The AI models run on your own Mac or Windows machine, so airplane mode, air-gapped rooms, and dead hotel Wi-Fi change nothing. 100% free. Everything stays on your device.
Plenty of screen recorders work offline — OBS Studio will happily record with no connection. What you get is a video file: no transcript, no text extraction, no way to find anything without scrubbing. And plenty of AI recorders produce searchable transcripts — by uploading your audio and screen content to a cloud that isn't there when you're on a plane, behind a client's firewall, or working through an outage.
The overlap — AI understanding that runs with no internet at all — is nearly empty, because it requires shipping the actual models to your machine. That's how LUCI is built. Speech-to-text, screen understanding, and the search index all run on-device, accelerated by your NPU or GPU when you have one (on Windows, via Microsoft's Foundry Local, which detects your hardware and falls back to CPU seamlessly). One honest caveat, which applies to every tool in this category including Microsoft Recall: the models download once at setup. After that, connectivity is optional, permanently.
This page is about the offline scenarios specifically. For the broader product — memory, search, and the MCP access your agents get to it — see the main AI screen recorder page.
Record a working session at 35,000 feet, review a client call transcript on the train, search yesterday's screen activity from a hotel with hostile Wi-Fi. LUCI doesn't distinguish between online and offline — the models are already on your machine.
Secure facilities, isolated lab networks, client sites that prohibit outbound data. Cloud-processing recorders are non-starters there — the audio has nowhere permitted to go. LUCI's pipeline produces no outbound flow of captured content at all.
Some organizations don't block the internet — they block your data from leaving. A recorder that uploads audio for transcription violates the policy on day one. On-device processing means the compliance answer is structural, not contractual.
Cloud tools fail quietly when the network flakes: uploads stall, processing queues, notes never arrive. LUCI never queues on a server. If your machine is on, capture, transcription, and search are on.
1. Capture uses the operating system's native screen and audio APIs — nothing about capture ever needed a network.
2. Transcription runs a local speech-to-text model on your machine. Audio goes from your sound card to your own processor and never anywhere else.
3. Understanding interprets what's on your screen, on-device, and builds structure — which app, which document, what changed.
4. Search queries a local index on your disk. Ask "the spreadsheet with the budget numbers from Tuesday" in a basement with no signal and get the same answer you'd get on fiber.
5. Storage is an encrypted database on your own disk. There is no sync service, no upload queue waiting for connectivity, and no copy of your work on anyone's server.
"Cloud AI recorders" below covers the typical capture-locally-process-in-cloud tools.
| Capability | LUCI | OBS Studio | Microsoft Recall | Cloud AI recorders |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Records with no internet | × | |||
| Transcribes audio offline | × | × | × | |
| On-device screen understanding + plain-English search | × | × | ||
| Runs on ordinary hardware (no NPU required) | × | |||
| Mac and Windows | × | Varies | ||
| Captures meetings (audio + screen) | Video only | × | Varies |
OBS is excellent free software for what it does — recording. Recall requires a Copilot+ PC (40-TOPS NPU, Windows 11) and, per Microsoft's documentation, does not record audio.
Yes — recording, transcription, on-device video understanding, and search all run on your machine, so none of them needs a connection. One honest caveat applies to every on-device AI tool: the AI models are downloaded once when you first set up. After that, you can stay offline indefinitely — record on a flight, in an air-gapped room, or through an outage, and everything works.
Local means your data is stored on your device. Offline means the tool keeps functioning with no network at all. Many 'local-first' tools still need the internet for the AI step — they capture locally, then process in the cloud, so they fail on a plane. LUCI is both: data stays local, and the AI itself runs on-device, so nothing breaks when the connection disappears.
For raw recording, yes — OBS records perfectly well offline. What you get is a video file. There's no transcript, no understanding of what's on screen, and no way to search 'the dashboard with the Q3 numbers' — you scrub through footage manually. LUCI records and understands: everything you capture becomes a searchable, on-device memory.
Recall also processes on-device, but it requires a Copilot+ PC with a 40-TOPS NPU and only runs on Windows 11 — and by Microsoft's own documentation it doesn't record audio, so meetings are invisible to it. LUCI runs on any modern Mac or Windows machine, uses your NPU or GPU when available (falling back to CPU), and captures screen and audio together.
LUCI is built for exactly that constraint: no telemetry pipeline carrying your recordings, no cloud dependency, and recordings, transcripts, and the search index stored encrypted on the local disk. Because inference is on-device, there is no outbound flow of captured content to audit. For formally air-gapped networks, do the initial model download on a provisioning connection per your security policy, then run disconnected.
No — offline is not a degraded mode, it's the only mode. LUCI has no cloud tier to fall back to or be downgraded from: the same on-device models handle transcription, screen understanding, and search whether you're connected or not. Tools with a cloud 'best' model and an offline 'small' model make that trade; LUCI doesn't.
LUCI's AI runs on your machine, so offline is just another Tuesday.
100% free. Mac & Windows. Nothing is ever uploaded.