Recording a meeting with Notetaker

Notetaker records your meetings into a meeting note with a live transcript and a Summary. Recording runs in the standalone notepad window, the Flow Bar shows a live recording pill, and each calendar event keeps a single note — rejoining never creates duplicates. Setup and permissions live in the getting-started article.

Ways to start a recording

• Opt + M, anywhere: calendar-aware — no active meeting opens a blank recorder, exactly one joins and starts recording, several opens a meeting picker on the Flow Bar, and an active recording is brought forward. If Flow detects you're already in the call, it defaults to "Just record".

• The Flow Bar: the record-disc button next to the dictate capsule starts a session (hover: "Take notes"). A "new" indicator appears on the Start Meeting button until you complete your first real recording. While something is recording, clicking the Flow Bar body opens a current-meetings drawer with Switch rows and a "Start new note" footer row.

• Calendar meeting rows (drawer and reminders): Join + Start opens the link and records (sublabel: "& start Notetaker"); its caret adds Join meeting (link only) and Start Notetaker (record only). With another meeting recording, the button reads Switch. Declined meetings don't appear here.

• Meeting reminders: on the Flow Bar from about 70 seconds before a meeting until 5 minutes after it begins, with the same split-button actions; already in the call, the default flips to "Start Notetaker." Stacking, snoozing, and the "Meeting detected" card live in the meeting-detection article.

• Upcoming events: meetings in progress or starting within 10 minutes show Join and record in the tray, upcoming list, and preview card; if you're already in the call, or the event has no conference link (in-person), you get a direct Record button.

• Without a calendar event: New note (plus icon) in the hub, the menu-bar tray or dock menu (Start Notetaker → Start new note), or ⌘⇧R.

One meeting records at a time: opening another meeting or note shows a single "Stop recording?" confirmation — confirm to finalize the current recording, cancel to keep it. If the previous one is still finishing, Flow shows "Still finishing the last recording. Try again in a moment."

If permissions are missing, the recorder opens on the "Complete setup to start Notetaker" screen, with a consent reminder at the bottom: "Always ask for consent before transcribing. Read our privacy policy". Escape or Back leaves without starting. Left idle about 20 seconds, it warns "Notetaker isn't recording yet — Finish setup to start recording your meeting" with Finish Setup and Close Notetaker buttons. If your account or organization blocks recording (HIPAA or Cloud Sync policy), a modal explains why — dismiss with the X, a click outside, or Escape.

First-meeting nudge

The first time Wispr Flow detects a meeting, it shows a card asking whether you'd like to transcribe it. The card varies by your Private Cloud Sync setting.

• Private Cloud Sync off: the card reads "Transcribe this meeting with Wispr?" with body text "By selecting 'Yes' you agree to turn on Private Cloud Sync, which allows us to process and store your transcriptions. Wispr Notetaker requires this." Yes turns on Private Cloud Sync and starts Notetaker; Another time dismisses the card without affecting your active dictation or any settings.

• Private Cloud Sync already on (including enabled by plan or organization policy): the card reads "Nothing extra joins the call. Notetaker captures what everyone says and summarizes after." Yes opens Notetaker with no settings changed; Another time dismisses the card.

Weekly recording limits

Notetaker caps the number of meeting notes you can create each week, varying by plan.

• One note remaining: a warning notification reads "Only 1 meeting note left this week."

• Limit reached: new recordings are blocked. A notification reads "You have no meeting notes left this week" with an Upgrade option (free plans only) and an Ok button. Any active live recording is stopped safely before the block takes effect, and audio and notes up to that point are preserved.

• Notetaker hub banner: the Notetaker page in the hub shows notes remaining, the reset date (e.g. "Resets Monday, Aug 3rd"), and an Upgrade button if applicable. The week resets Monday on UTC time.

What you see when recording starts

• First meeting: the recorder opens on the Transcript tab with a "Welcome to Notetaker!" prompt that clears once speech transcribes. About 5 seconds later a one-time spotlight tooltip points at the Notes tab — "Take your own notes here" — fading after about 6 seconds or on click.

• Afterward: defaults are Notes for a live meeting, Summary for an ended or past one (resuming an ended meeting keeps Summary selected). Deep links such as a "View summary" notification open their tab directly.

• Consent notice: "Always get consent when transcribing others. Learn more" shows above the composer for 15 seconds of on-screen time; "Learn more" opens the Notetaker consent section of the Wispr Flow Terms of Service.

While you record

• Recording pill: a green wave with the note title and a stop button (Stop Notetaker in tooltips and to screen readers). Clicking the pill opens your note on the current macOS desktop (Space); the stop button only stops. Hovering the pill during an active meeting shows the meeting title and a live word count that updates as people speak — hidden before any speech and while the connection is being restored.

• Tabs: Notes, Transcript, Summary. The Transcript tab shows a live voicewave and timer (M:SS) while recording, then speaker count and duration ("3 speakers · 42:10"); search, copy, assign-speakers, and per-line flagging sit in its bar. The live transcript doesn't separate speakers — the refined transcript with names arrives after the meeting. The Summary tab shows a live "X min read" estimate.

• Summary actions wait: Generate/Update summary are hidden until recording stops, and the "Get ready for your next meeting" callout hides too so it never overlaps the consent notice. The chat stays available: ask questions ("What's he saying?"); notes change only when you explicitly ask ("Update my notes with X."). The What did I miss? chip recaps the last couple of minutes — "Nothing new since you last looked." if nothing was said.

• Reminders: reminders arriving mid-recording slide beside the Flow Bar (up to 4, a badge for more); reminders for the meeting you're recording are suppressed.

• Microphone: Notetaker uses your Mac's system-default mic. While a meeting is actively recording, check or change it from the notepad header's ⋯ menu → Microphone → Change system microphone…, which opens System Settings → Sound → Input. Before or between meetings, select your Notetaker microphone from the Flow Bar status menu or Settings → Notetaker. Mid-meeting device changes switch within about a quarter to half a second; a transient mic failure keeps the meeting on system audio only, and lost system audio continues on mic alone. Dictation shares the mic — pausing to dictate keeps the meeting open and resumes automatically.

• Interruptions: brief connection loss keeps recording ("Still recording · Reconnecting…"). If restoring takes longer, Flow keeps trying in the background and the live transcript resumes automatically once your network recovers. Sleeps of 5 seconds or more leave a transcript marker ("Your device slept for 1 hr 11 min"); pauses insert a gap divider with exact times on hover — no content is lost.

• Also: sharing works as soon as the meeting is created ("Preparing meeting…" tooltip until ready); the menu bar tray and status header show the same meeting ("Team Sync • in 8 min", "Team Sync • 53m left"); back (⌘[) goes to the hub without closing the notepad.

How recordings stop

• Stop always works: from the pill or the meeting window, even if Cloud Sync or system audio dropped, and even during a connection attempt. Flow always shows a toast first — recordings are never stopped silently.

• Leaving the call: Flow detects when you leave and, after a brief moment, stops and saves the recording. If the meeting ended while you were in the call, you'll see "End of meeting detected, so recording stopped" (wrapped to two lines so it stays fully visible) with a clickable Resume button; other auto-stops show an "Auto-ended" notice with Resume. Tap Resume to continue; dismissing or ignoring the notice leaves the recording finalized with no side effects. Moving the same call to another browser keeps the recording running — it stops only when the browser actually hosting the call leaves, and an audio-device change such as connecting AirPods won't wrongly stop it. Back-to-back meetings count as a new join; the previous recording finalizes on its own. Recordings are not stopped during the first 90 seconds of a session.

• Check-ins: a 30-second "Still recording?" toast appears after extended silence, about 10 minutes past the scheduled end, and past the one-hour mark. Ignoring the silence toast stops the recording; ignoring the others keeps recording.

• Maximum length: 30 minutes or 1, 2, or 3 hours, set in Settings → Notetaker (default 2 hours), changeable mid-recording. A warning toast fires 2 minutes ahead of the 30-minute limit and 5 minutes ahead of the 1-, 2-, and 3-hour limits, with an Extend to [next length] button that raises the limit and keeps recording (approaching 1 hour, it offers 2 hours). At the 3-hour maximum the toast shows Dismiss and Stop instead, and recordings stop just under 3 hours to avoid a hard cutoff.

• After you stop: the Flow Bar resets within about a second while audio encodes in the background (Start and Resume stay disabled until done). Meetings over 5 minutes with no summary switch to the Summary tab and generate automatically — "Processing audio…", then "Generating Summary…", usually 2 to 5 minutes — with the refined transcript and speaker names. When the summary finishes, your first meeting shows a confetti banner with an "Explore Summary" button; later meetings show a toast with the meeting name and estimated time saved on notetaking. A notification reads "Your summary is ready" with the number of words Wispr captured. Short meetings (under about 5 minutes), fast-user-switched meetings, and meetings that already have a summary show a Generate summary or Update summary button instead.

• Meeting titles: Flow generates a title automatically after each meeting ends. If title generation is interrupted (a network hiccup, or quitting the app right after a meeting), Flow retries automatically, and untitled meetings are picked up the next time you open the app or in a periodic background pass. If you rename or delete a meeting mid-generation, your action wins. The manual "Generate title" button in the note is a single quick attempt. Titles for meetings synced from another device are not changed locally.

• Very short or failed recordings: under about 20 words, a "Started by mistake?" prompt offers Keep and Discard with the message "Only a few words were captured. Keep this meeting or discard it." Discard deletes a brand-new short meeting; a resumed one keeps its earlier transcript and summary. Silent recordings are discarded automatically. A recording that never connected shows "Couldn't start recording" with Discard and Try again — typed notes are always kept.

Resume a meeting

Rejoining a live meeting from the hub, drawer, or Opt + M reopens the same recording and note; pause and resume within a session works immediately. To resume a finalized meeting, open it in Past meetings and click Resume — Flow appends the new audio and re-runs transcription and summarization across both segments. The button shows only while resuming will work: local audio retained (90 days by default), meeting fully uploaded, Cloud Sync on, transcript not erased by retention settings. Stale attempts show "The original audio is no longer available" or "This recording can no longer be resumed."; genuine failures show "Couldn't resume: …". Crash-interrupted recordings (including WAV fallbacks) can be resumed with pre-crash audio preserved.

An existing summary is never overwritten silently: the tabs show "New recording since this summary. Updating replaces any edits you made." and "New recording since this transcript.", with an Update summary & transcript button that regenerates both immediately, with no extra confirmation — manual summary edits are lost. Speaker attributions survive a resume. Meetings with no summary, or a "too short to summarize" placeholder, regenerate automatically once the full recording is uploaded. If the update can't run, "Couldn't update summary." appears with Try again and nothing is touched.

Common issues

FAQs

Limitations and notes

• Mac only, rolling out gradually.

• Meeting note creation is subject to a weekly limit that varies by plan. When the limit is reached, new recordings are blocked until the week resets. Upgrading your plan increases your weekly allowance.

• The one-click system audio prompt requires macOS 14.4 or later; macOS 14.3 and earlier needs Screen Recording permission and a Wispr Flow restart — see the getting-started article.

• Recording stops at your configured maximum length (up to 3 hours), set in Settings → Notetaker. Shortly after Flow detects you left the call, recording stops and saves — even if you keep talking — unless you tap Resume on the auto-stop notice. Temporary audio glitches such as switching to AirPods, connecting to a dock, or a brief audio service restart do not trigger an auto-stop, and neither does moving the same call between browsers. Auto-stop does not trigger during the first 90 seconds of a session.

• A macOS fast user switch stops and saves the recording immediately with no automatic summary; screen lock and screensavers do not stop a recording.

• Because encoding runs in the background after Stop, the very last words may occasionally be cut off if you were speaking as you stopped; pausing briefly first reduces the chance.

• The Notetaker pill and recording controls cannot be hidden while Notetaker is available. Settings → Notetaker ("Hide from screen shares and screenshots") controls whether the Notepad and Flow Bar appear in screen shares and screenshots; it is off by default for new installs, so both appear unless you turn it on.

• The live word count in the Flow Bar tooltip appears only while the live transcript is active and after some speech has been captured — not during reconnecting states.

• There is no in-app indicator when a meeting is running on system audio only after a mic failure.

• With Private Cloud Sync off, notes save locally and backfill when you enable sync; the refined transcript and speaker labels do not.

• The Microphone option in the note's ⋯ menu appears only while that specific meeting is actively recording — not on past or stopped meetings, and not on shared notes.

• Auto-generated titles are only recovered for locally recorded meetings from the past 7 days. Meetings synced from another device are not retitled locally.

• When the live transcript shows "Still listening · Reconnecting…", no attempt count or elapsed time is displayed — this is expected.

• For in-person recordings where multiple people share the same mic, speaker mentions in the Summary display as "Speaker N" until the recording ends and the refined transcript is processed. Speakers you have already named keep their name and color immediately. Remote video calls and solo recordings are not affected.