Is there a completely local option for something like this? I love the idea, but I don't love having yet another middleman in between everything I say and the model provider of my choice.

Device wise - i never found one as good and i played with a bunch. However, you have three options with plaud that i'm aware of:

1. If you want something totally open source: https://github.com/RemiPelloux/OpenPlod

Local-first Plaud Note Pro recording vault, transcription, and Markdown workspace. Which sounds like what you want.

2. the Plaud SDK will let you pull from the device and send it wherever you want without touching their servers.

3. You can also use the mobile app, disable cloud sync, and export each audio file as mp3/wav to your phone/tablet/whatever if you don't want to use #1 or #2.

You can have it upload to your private cloud without doing any of these, but it still transits their servers first i believe, which it sounds like you are trying to avoid