The live transcript in Notetaker
Last updated: September 26, 2026
Available on: Mac and Windows, where Notetaker is enabled for your account. Mac system audio requires macOS Ventura or later.
Use the Transcript tab to follow speech, search earlier words or copy the conversation. Live text and speaker labels can change after the meeting.
Read and search the transcript
Live Transcript is on unless you have changed it. Starting with it off still saves audio for post-meeting processing. Turning it off mid-meeting hides the tab; turning it back on does not start live transcription for a meeting that began with it off.
Follow: During recording, new speech scrolls into view while you are at the bottom and not searching. Scrolling up pauses following; Jump to bottom resumes it.
Labels: Live views show You/Others by audio source, or numbered speakers.
Markers: Sleep, pause/resume, Dictated and audio-event markers can appear; hover a pause divider for its pause/resume times.
Note: On Mac, granting Screen Recording permission requires restarting Flow; granting System Audio Recording Only does not. A device another app is using exclusively cannot be captured.
Warning: On Windows, if system audio capture fails you see Could not capture system audio or System audio capture stopped, and other people's speech is no longer captured for the rest of that recording. Your microphone keeps recording. Start a new recording to capture system audio again.
Open search with Cmd+F on Mac or Ctrl+F on Windows; / also works outside text fields.
Enter at least two characters.
Navigate with Enter/↓ for next or Shift+Enter/↑ for previous; matches wrap around.
Search ignores case, matches partial words and treats punctuation literally. Live searches exclude newer speech; clear and rerun the query to include it. Escape clears and closes search, resuming following during recording. After a meeting stops, search covers the current transcript.
Understand speaker names
On Mac, automatic naming requires Accessibility permission for Wispr Flow. Unsupported layouts or non-English meeting-app interfaces can leave numbered speakers, which you can rename after the meeting.
With one voice in a microphone-only recording, you appear as You or Name (You); exports and summaries use your profile name.
Meeting-app naming requirements
The meeting app must use the microphone; browser meetings also need a recognized meeting URL.
Meeting app | Naming requirements |
Google Meet | Chrome (including Beta/Dev/Canary), Edge or Brave; Chromium on Mac; Safari unsupported. Page-layout changes can affect detection. |
Zoom | Native app with readable meeting windows; on Mac, Accessibility permission for Zoom; on Windows, an English interface. |
Microsoft Teams | On Mac, the native Teams app with a visible meeting window; the compact call window also works. |
Slack huddles | Require the desktop app. |
Webex and Discord | No automatic speaker naming, so Discord calls use numbered speakers. |
When your meeting name differs from your Flow profile
If your tile in the meeting app shows a different display name than your Wispr Flow profile, your own speech is still labelled as you rather than a numbered speaker, as long as that tile was only detected in the meeting app, no other tile is already linked to you, and the tile does not match another speaker.
Names that come from the calendar invite, identities that have already been merged, and conflicting evidence about other participants stay on numbered speakers instead, so no one else is labelled with the wrong name.
Teams on Mac: when names are read
Flow reads participant names from the native Teams meeting window and checks the full participant list before using it.
Window must be visible: A Teams window that is hidden, minimized, on another Space or fully covered by other windows is not used for names; Flow falls back to the compact call window so names keep working.
Duplicate names: Participants who share the same display name are left out of name matching, so their speech stays on a numbered speaker.
When names cannot be read, that part of the transcript stays on numbered speakers rather than being attributed to the wrong person.
Conference rooms and echoed speech
Listening through speakers rather than a headset — for example in a conference room — lets your microphone pick up the other side of the call, so the live transcript can show the same words twice, once as You and once as Others.
The refined transcript created after the meeting clears that echoed room speech from the microphone side, including the run of it at the start, so it appears once and is credited to the right speaker rather than to you. Your own speech is kept, apart from up to about two seconds immediately before an echo starts.
When live text stops
Hovering the Flow bar's meeting pill can show Still listening · Reconnecting… while the Notetaker window is unfocused and the meeting is not wrapping up. Audio records locally during reconnection, and live text resumes when connectivity returns. Short interruptions catch up; longer outages can leave an Offline for <duration> — audio was captured and will be transcribed after the meeting marker, and post-meeting processing recovers missing words when saved audio is available. Signing out or a revoked session ends reconnection attempts.
Choose Record offline when offered to save audio on this device, or Cancel.
Select Generate summary after recording, once online, if offered.
The offline offer works once and expires after a newer start attempt. Failed-start cards say whether audio was saved, and dismissing a saved-recording notice does not delete its audio.
Warning: Discard deletes saved audio, except when you typed notes into the recording — then nothing is deleted.
Warning: Full storage stops offline recording. A live-transcribed recording continues but keeps only its live transcript, because refinement needs local audio. Free up space.
For saved-audio recovery, see Offline meeting recording.
If your Mac goes to sleep
When sleep ends a recording, audio capture and live transcription stop at the moment your Mac sleeps, so the saved audio and transcript match the recorded end time. Waking up finishes processing the recording; it does not resume it.
After the meeting
Keep Flow online while post-meeting processing finishes. If a recording cannot be sent when it finishes — for example your connection drops — Flow retries on its own, and a waiting meeting usually finishes within seconds once the connection is back.
The meeting must still be resumable; missing, empty, unreadable or expired audio, or retention deletion, prevents further processing. The previous summary stays visible during updates and failures.
Silent or very short recordings can show The meeting was too short to summarize. Recording more audio can make an update available and produce a summary.
Update after recording more audio
Warning: Updating replaces the transcript and summary and can overwrite summary edits — save edits first. Your personal notes are not rewritten.
Select Update Summary when the full recording is ready.
The control spans notepad tabs for Flow-recorded meetings, not imports, and is hidden while recording. Leaving it alone keeps existing results.
Retention and resume limits
Warning: Local meeting audio is kept for seven days by default, which is also the resume window. A retention-deleted transcript cannot be restored or regenerated, and the deleted-transcript state does not identify who deleted it or when. See meeting-data retention.
Copy or share a transcript
The Transcript tab's copy button copies the whole transcript with displayed speaker labels. Cmd+C on Mac or Ctrl+C on Windows does the same when nothing is selected and focus is outside text fields. The Summary tab's copy action copies only the summary.
My thoughts stays private. Shared summaries can still include transcript-derived content and speaker names.
Warning: Check copied content before sending it.
Sharing restrictions and access changes
The owner's organization policy applies even to recipients in other organizations, and changes apply without restarting. Ask the owner's administrator about access under the current policy.
If access is missing, check the account in the web header and use Switch account. There is no Request access button.
Still need help?
Use transcript and summary troubleshooting for missing or stuck results. If text is still missing, contact support with your platform, meeting app and the steps you tried.