Flow Summaries in Notetaker

Stop a Notetaker recording and Flow turns the conversation into a summary, a to-do list, and clean notes, added alongside anything you typed yourself. Most summaries are ready in 2 to 5 minutes; long or detailed meetings take extra time instead of failing.

What a summary is

A structured recap written after a recording ends, added as a collapsible section directly under your own notes: a one-sentence TL;DR, Key Points, Decisions, and Action Items — only the parts that apply. It refers to you as "you" ("you'll send the recap") and to other participants by name.

• Hub preview: a past meeting shows the first paragraph of the TL;DR; while processing, cycling status messages appear. Summaries are not backfilled to older meetings.

• Tabs: Notes · Transcript · Summary. Ended and past meetings open on Summary, a live meeting on My Notes, and your very first live meeting on Transcript so you can watch live transcription build. A "View summary" notification or Tasks deep link opens the tab it references; clicking View Summary opens that meeting's Summary tab in the already-open notepad or the hub — never a second window.

How generation works

• Auto-summarization: runs only when the meeting has no existing summary and more than 5 minutes of total recorded audio, counting earlier segments when you resume. When a summary is expected, the notepad silently switches to the Summary tab on stop — the window is never focused or raised.

• In-panel loading: while the initial summary generates, the Summary tab shows a status pill with rotating messages (for example, "Turning your meeting into a two-minute read", word counts, speaker counts) and a skeleton placeholder. With reduced-motion settings enabled, a single static "Generating Summary..." title replaces them and the shimmer animation is disabled.

• Generation band: re-runs and error states use the footer progress band instead of in-panel loading. One band above the composer holds every loading, error, and generate state for re-runs — stage, step counter, and elapsed time (always from 0:00). The Summary tab shows a live "X min read" estimate; the stage progression (transcribing → summarizing → complete) only moves forward.

• Connect calendar / connect apps callout: during generation, a dismissible callout may appear in the notepad footer encouraging you to connect your calendar (for speaker names) or other apps (for pre-meeting briefs). Dismissing it is remembered — it won't reappear.

• While a summary is refined: speaker chips, bold, italics, links, and citation chips stay inline as the text builds out. In the hub meeting list, summary text reveals word by word.

• When a summary finishes: for your very first meeting, a dark banner slides up from the bottom with confetti, an illustration, the number of words summarized, and an Explore Summary button. For later meetings, a mint-green toast estimates how many minutes of notetaking Flow saved you, based on transcript length. Each appears for about 6 seconds while you're viewing the Summary tab, shows only once per meeting, and does not reappear when you reopen it. A "Your summary is ready" notification shows the meeting name. After your first completed meeting, you'll also get a notification while the summary is still processing — it shows an estimated wait of about 2 minutes for Flow to improve the transcript, identify speakers, and generate the summary, plus your meeting's word count (in shorthand for very long meetings, e.g. "12.3K words").

• Failures: you get a notification immediately and the band shows the error with a single Try again button.

• Short meetings stopped from the notepad: never auto-generate. A centered Generate summary button appears on stop, works even offline once local audio finishes encoding, and stays available for the full 24-hour audio retention window.

• Placeholders: "Not auto-generated." when no summary was auto-generated; "Summary generates when you stop." while recording; "Your summary is ready. Check it out →" when a summary has just been generated and you're viewing the Notes tab.

• After stopping: the flow bar clears its "wrapping up" state usually in under a second while encoding continues; Start/Resume stay disabled until encoding completes, and the very last words may occasionally be cut off. Clicking Record on another meeting too soon shows "Still finishing the last recording. Try again in a moment."

• Auto-end: when Flow detects the meeting has ended and stops recording automatically, a notification reads "End of meeting detected, so recording stopped."

• Titles: untitled meetings get a 3–6 word generated title. If the network drops, the app is slow, or you quit right after a meeting ends, title generation retries automatically — and a recovery pass at app launch (and every 24 hours) fills in blank titles for your locally-recorded meetings from the last 7 days. A title you typed or renamed manually is never overwritten, and calendar-event titles carry through refinement. Meetings synced from another device are not retitled locally.

• Transcript timing: a summary arriving does not mean the refined transcript is ready — Flow keeps processing until both are complete.

• Sync and upload priority: newly recorded meetings sync and upload first, so their audio and summaries process promptly even with a large backlog of older unsynced meetings. A backlog from signing back in, going offline, or importing catches up automatically in the background.

Editing, speakers, and citations

• Your edits: save and sync across devices and appear in the hover preview within about 1 second; your typed notes are never rewritten. Deleting the Summary section keeps it deleted — an Add summary chip lets you regenerate it deliberately.

• Speaker names: appear as underlined mentions; assigning or renaming updates the name live everywhere (summary, transcript, to-dos, previews, search) with no regeneration. Unassigned mentions (dotted underline) show a Who is this? card on hover. In ad-hoc meetings Flow can name speakers who self-introduce or are directly addressed; manual assignments take precedence.

• Speaker chips: speaker ordinals that don't yet match a known name still render as chips and update to the correct name once the speaker is identified. When the same speaker number is genuinely ambiguous — for example, arriving from both your microphone and system audio at once — Flow leaves that reference as plain "Speaker N" text to avoid attributing a quote to the wrong person. Speaker chips never appear inside links or elaboration content. The summary in the notes panel is identical to the Summary tab.

• In-person recordings (multiple people sharing one mic): while the transcript is still being refined, unassigned speaker mentions in the summary appear as "Speaker N" without a hover card, so one person's name isn't shown for multiple speakers. Once you assign a name from the Transcript tab, that name and chip color appear immediately in the summary. Speakers you've already named keep their label while the transcript finalizes. Remote calls (Zoom, Google Meet), solo recordings, and meetings with a completed refined transcript are unaffected.

• Calendar-linked 1:1 meetings: both you and the other invitee are named automatically — including on Slack huddles and when using laptop speakers instead of headphones. Meetings where two people share one mic stay unlabeled to avoid wrong names; use Assign Speakers to name them manually.

• Fully-named meetings: every person who spoke appears as a name or chip in both the summary and the notes document. Plain "Speaker N" text only appears for participants who did not speak, or where the speaker is genuinely ambiguous.

• Solo and undiarized meetings: when you record without other participants, or where speaker separation isn't available, your mic audio is attributed to you by name (as set in your profile) consistently across the notepad and the hub meeting detail panel. With no name in your profile, the speaker falls back to "Speaker N".

• Deduplication: the speaker selector draws only from resolved identities, so the same person never appears twice; you are recognized as the owner whenever a calendar attendee's email matches your account, even if not flagged as "self." Anonymous Next Steps owners stay as speaker chips or "Unknown" — never a guessed name — ordered named owners, then "Speaker N", then "Unknown."

• Hover detail: some lines expand on hover into a popover with fuller detail; Esc closes it. Copying includes the inline text, not the popover.

• Citations: pills show the source type (Gmail, Slack, Calendar, Notion, Web, or Meeting); hover for the specific channel, email, or event; click to open the source. Links carry a small site icon.

• Copying: Copy to Markdown in the notepad header copies the whole meeting (attendees, Flow Summary, pre-read, notes, action items, chat, transcript) with assigned speaker names throughout; the Summary tab's copy action copies just the Summary.

Resuming and updating a summary

Resuming a meeting that already has a summary keeps it; the Summary tab shows "New recording since this summary. Updating replaces any edits you made." Click Update Summary in the generation band to regenerate the summary and transcript from the full recording: speaker tags (including names assigned before you paused) are preserved, but manual edits are replaced, so review them first.

When a resumed recording's audio covers the whole meeting, the summary generates automatically, the refined transcript (with named speakers) replaces the live one, and the Update Summary button clears on its own. The button stays armed when a summary is still generating while you resume, so you can regenerate over all segments once it finishes. Manually edited summaries are never silently overwritten.

If the new summary is identical to the old one, the overlay may take 1–2 minutes to clear. On failure the band shows "Couldn't update summary." with Try again, and your existing summary is untouched. Meetings with no summary, or in a "too short to summarize" state, regenerate automatically when you stop or resume.

Catching up mid-meeting and extracting to-dos

• What did I miss? Click the chip while recording. A panel covers roughly the last 20 minutes of what other participants said (your speech excluded), refreshing about every minute — no "Speaker 1 said…" attributions; dimmed "ghost" bullets are still settling. It can be minimized to a pill and adds nothing to your chat history.

• Extract to-dos: available once a summary exists. A "Generating…" toast runs usually under a minute and tells you if nothing is actionable. A task is attributed to you only when the transcript identifies you as the one who committed to it; it always replies in chat and never rewrites your notes.

If processing hits a snag

• Interrupted uploads retry as soon as your Mac wakes, stuck meetings recover on their own, and a summary or refined transcript that didn't arrive is fetched and merged in without touching your notes.

• Signing in after launching the app immediately pulls down any refined transcripts that are ready — no second relaunch needed. A refined transcript still in progress when you signed out will not be mixed into a different account's meetings.

• Failed transcript fetches retry automatically with a limited budget and increasing waits between attempts. Attempts made while you're offline or hitting a temporary connection issue don't count against that budget. If a transcript is re-processed, Flow always makes fresh attempts to fetch it.

• If generation fails and the meeting's audio is stored server-side, Try again will not work — use Generate summary instead.

• Recordings stopped by a macOS user-account switch don't auto-generate: click Generate summary, available for up to 24 hours.

• A recording that never connected is deleted from past meetings rather than sitting stuck "uploading" — unless you typed notes, in which case the meeting is kept.

• A meeting title that didn't generate is filled in automatically the next time you open the app, or within 24 hours. If you rename or delete a meeting while a title is being generated, your action takes priority and is never overwritten.

• If meetings appear unsynced or summaries aren't generating after signing back in or coming back online, Flow syncs automatically in the background, newest meetings first. The backlog drains on its own.

FAQs

Limitations and notes

• The "too short to summarize" state is final — no retry loop, no "Generate anyway" button.

• In mic-only calls with system audio off, distinct voices stay separate; one person may occasionally appear as two anonymous speakers.

• Two attendees with the same display name are always kept as separate speakers.

• Older meetings pick up corrected speaker names only after re-refining with Update Summary — no automatic backfill.

• Gmail and Calendar citations link to the app, not the specific email or event; web-view citations are plain text, and pills without a valid link render as plain prose or non-clickable chips.

• Copy to Markdown flattens collapsible toggles, uses default labels (e.g., "Speaker 1 (Maya)") when no names are assigned, and reflects the meeting at the moment you click copy. The exported document uses the heading "## Flow Summary" regardless of any in-app label changes.

• Read-only views (shared links, hub detail panel) display Summary content flush-left with the toggle hidden.

• Share-invite emails show a summary preview matching the shared web view — assigned speakers by name, unassigned as "Speaker N." No-summary meetings send a link-only invite; to resend, remove the recipient and re-invite them.

• Recordings where microphone audio was withheld for privacy are not auto-recovered.

• Automatic title recovery applies only to your locally-recorded meetings from the last 7 days, not to meetings synced from another device; the manual "Generate title" button remains a single attempt.

• Summary celebration messages (the first-meeting banner and the mint-green toast) do not end with a period.

• Non-English versions of the app may still show older wording (such as "Flow Summary") until translations are updated.

• Summary sections include headings, bullet points, subpoints, Next Steps, and Decisions — limits on the number of points per section and on text lengths still apply.