Recording a meeting with Notetaker

Available on: Mac and Windows, where Notetaker is enabled for your account. Recording on Mac requires macOS 13 or later. Meeting recording is not available on iOS.

Notetaker captures a meeting, shows a live transcript, and produces a summary afterward. Your typed Thoughts notes and the AI Summary are stored separately.

Before you record

• Ask participants for consent before transcribing.
• Finish Flow onboarding and grant microphone and system audio access. A “Complete setup to start Notetaker” screen means recording has not started. Follow its permission and restart instructions; see Getting started with Notetaker.
• Check your Notetaker access. A signed personal or organization HIPAA BAA blocks recording. Your administrator can also disable Notetaker or block recordings involving certain attendee domains. Follow the access message or contact your administrator.
• Check the Notetaker hub for your remaining weekly allowance and reset date. Limits vary by plan and reset Monday, UTC. At the limit, new recordings are blocked until your allowance resets or increases.

Start a recording

Choose the route that matches your meeting:

Meeting	How to start
A meeting on your connected calendar	Open Notetaker and find it under Upcoming. Choose Join and record. If you are already in the call, or the event has no conference link, choose Start.
An in-person or unscheduled meeting	Click New note in the Notetaker hub, or use the Flow Bar’s record button to start a session. You do not need a calendar event.
Use a Mac shortcut	Press Option + M. It opens a blank recorder, starts the available meeting, shows a meeting picker, or brings forward an active recording, depending on your current meetings. You can change this shortcut in Settings.

If a reminder opens the recorder behind your meeting app, click the recording pill to bring it forward. Complete any setup screen before continuing; a background recorder may need you to click Turn on to trigger the system audio prompt.

Only one meeting records at a time. Opening another meeting may ask you to stop the current recording. A Switch button takes over immediately without an additional confirmation. If the previous meeting is still saving, wait until “Still finishing the last recording” clears.

While recording

• Check the recording pill. It gives you access to the meeting and its Stop control.
• Use Transcript and Thoughts. Follow the live transcript or type your own notes. The refined transcript and speaker names arrive after processing.
• Ask questions in meeting chat. You can ask about what was said while the recording continues.
• Watch for missing audio. If the microphone fails, Flow may capture only other participants; if system audio fails, it may capture only you while retrying. An active recording does not guarantee both sources are working.

You can dictate while recording. Flow keeps the meeting open, resumes capture automatically after dictation, and marks the interruption in the transcript.

Stop recording and review the result

1. Finish speaking, then click Stop Notetaker in the recording pill or meeting window. Pausing briefly before Stop reduces the chance of cutting off your last words.
2. Wait for audio saving to finish. Start and Resume can be temporarily disabled during this step.
3. Open the meeting’s Summary and Transcript tabs. Processing commonly takes 2–5 minutes. If a summary does not generate automatically, use Generate summary when offered.

Flow can also stop when it detects that the call ended. Automatic stopping is controlled in Settings → Notetaker. If it stops before you are finished, use Resume when available. Keep going on a check-in dismisses that prompt; it does not disable all future automatic stops.

For Google Meet on Mac, automatic call-end detection from browser tabs or windows requires Chrome, Arc, or Dia and Accessibility permission. Safari and Firefox do not trigger automatic stopping from tab or window evidence alone. Check whether Flow is still recording when your call ends, and stop it manually if needed.

Recording length and interruptions

In Settings → Notetaker, choose a maximum recording length of 30 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours, or 3 hours; the default is 2 hours. The 3-hour setting stops at approximately 2 hours 58 minutes. The limit counts all recorded segments in the meeting, so stopping and resuming does not reset it.

Before the limit, a countdown offers a longer duration when available. Extend before the deadline or end the recording. Ignoring or dismissing the warning still results in a stop at the limit, even with automatic end-of-call stopping turned off.

• Connection lost: Flow can continue recording locally while reconnecting. If live transcription cannot start, choose Record offline when offered. Processing can resume when the connection returns, provided the audio was retained and your account permits processing. See Offline meeting recording.
• Mac sleep: recording stops at sleep. On wake, the notification offers Resume into the same meeting. It cannot capture audio while the Mac is asleep.
• Storage full: offline recording stops. A live-transcribed meeting can continue, but the later audio-refinement pass is unavailable and transcript saving can fail. Free up storage.

Resume a meeting

Open the meeting from the hub and click Resume to append another recorded segment. Resume requires usable original audio and remaining recording time. If it is unavailable, start a new meeting. Automatic stopping remains active after resuming.

An existing summary is preserved until you choose to update it. Update summary & transcript replaces manual summary edits immediately, without another confirmation. Save any edits you want to keep before updating. Your Thoughts notes are stored separately and are not rewritten by summary generation.

Short or failed recordings

A short recording may show Started by mistake? Choose Keep to retain it. Discard deletes a new short meeting. If recording failed, read the recovery card to see whether audio was saved; do not assume every failed attempt is recoverable.

If the card says audio was saved on this device, reconnect and allow processing to resume. Discard deletes the failed meeting and its audio; Try again starts a fresh recording.

For permission errors, missing audio, failed starts, or unavailable Resume, see Troubleshooting Notetaker recording and audio.