Flow Summaries in Notetaker

Available on: Mac and Windows. Some enterprise or HIPAA-restricted accounts cannot record; the recorder explains the restriction. Business-plan availability is still rolling out.

Flow Summaries turn a finished Notetaker recording into a structured recap in the Summary tab. Your typed notes and summary are stored separately. Most summaries take 2–5 minutes; longer or detailed meetings can take longer.

Generate and open a summary

1. Stop your recording. For a meeting without a summary, automatic generation requires enough recorded audio across all segments.
2. Open Summary, or click View Summary in the notepad or hub.
3. Check the band above the composer for generation progress, errors, and available actions.

Short recordings stopped from the notepad do not auto-generate. Use Generate summary after local audio finishes encoding; the button works offline and remains available until that audio is cleared. Not auto-generated means automatic generation did not run. Older meetings are not automatically given summaries retroactively.

Too short to summarize means too few words were spoken. A recording with no meaningful audio has a separate empty-audio result. Neither result has a retry option; record a longer session with more spoken content. On a Started by mistake? card, Keep saves the meeting. Discard deletes a fresh meeting and its audio, but removes only the new short segment from a resumed meeting.

Language and speaker names

The summary follows the spoken language; mixed-language meetings use the dominant language. Typed notes and calendar context do not override it. Names and quoted phrases keep their transcript spelling. The top-level “Action Items” heading and very-short-meeting placeholders remain in English.

Names can come from calendar information, visible participant tiles, or a speaker introducing themselves or being addressed by name. Unclear identities and shared microphones can leave “Speaker 1” or “Speaker 2” labels. Calendar-linked one-to-one meetings can name both attendees; in these meetings, sharing a microphone can leave speakers unlabeled to avoid assigning the wrong person.

Automatic participant-name detection depends on the meeting app and browser. Turning it off leaves numbered speaker labels; on Mac it also requires Accessibility permission for the Wispr Flow helper. A first name matches a full calendar name only when there is one clear match.

Meeting app	Automatic naming
Google Meet	Chrome, Edge, Brave, or Chromium.
Microsoft Teams	Native app or teams.microsoft.com in a Chromium browser, with named participant tiles visible.
Zoom	Native macOS app. Grant Zoom Accessibility permission in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility.
Slack huddles	Native desktop app with English interface; browser huddles are unsupported. Mute state is not detected.

Webex and other platforms have no automatic naming. Safari, Firefox, Arc, Opera, and Vivaldi can be detected as meetings but do not provide automatic names. If participant names cannot be read from the meeting window, Flow falls back to numbered labels.

Two attendees sharing a display name remain separate speakers. In microphone-only calls, one person can occasionally appear as two anonymous speakers. Speaker chips on shared notes are not clickable.

Edit or ask about the summary

Summary edits sync across devices independently of your notes. Regenerating a summary does not rewrite your typed notes or duplicate summary content into them. Deleting the summary keeps it deleted after reload; use Add summary to regenerate it deliberately.

Use Ask anything to ask about the meeting or request changes to the summary. Long rewrites apply section by section and preserve progress; a failed or timed-out request shows an error.

Update after resuming a recording

If new audio is not reflected in an existing summary, use Update Summary in the generation band to regenerate the summary and transcript from the full recording. The old summary stays visible until the replacement is ready.

If updating fails, the existing summary remains intact and Couldn’t update summary offers Try again. An identical replacement can leave the overlay visible for another 1–2 minutes. A deleted transcript cannot be regenerated with Update Summary.

Resume is unavailable when local audio has expired, been cleared, or become unreadable; the transcript is unavailable; or the meeting has reached its total recording limit across segments. Start a new recording instead. Immediately after stopping, Start and Resume stay disabled until audio encoding finishes.

Copy the summary or follow citations

The Summary tab’s copy action copies only the summary body. Copy to Markdown copies much more: notes, summary, attendees, Brief, chat, and transcript, using the meeting’s content at the moment you copy. Collapsible sections become expanded text.

Citation pills identify sources and open links when available. Gmail and Calendar citations open the app rather than the specific item. In web views, citations are plain text; a pill without a valid link is not clickable.

If a summary or transcript is missing

• Allow separate processing: a ready summary does not mean the refined transcript is ready.
• Restore your connection: keep Flow open and your computer online. Interrupted uploads and backlogs after signing in catch up automatically. If the transcript still does not appear after a few minutes, sign out and back in.
• Generation failed: use Try again in the error band. If the audio is stored server-side, use Generate summary instead.
• You switched macOS user accounts: the stopped recording does not auto-generate. Use Generate summary while its local audio remains available.

A “Your device slept” marker identifies audio that was not captured during sleep. Recordings where microphone audio was withheld for privacy are not automatically recovered. A recording that never connected is removed from past meetings unless you typed notes.

Report a summary problem

Open the meeting in the Hub and use the report option. Select Summary quality for problems with content, structure, or accuracy. Choose an issue category before submitting.