Recording a meeting with Notetaker

Notetaker records your meetings into a 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 rows for other meetings 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). 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 Start 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. Switch on a calendar reminder pill takes over the live recording directly without a confirmation; Join + Start and Start Notetaker still confirm first. Switch appears only when a different meeting is actively being recorded — with nothing recording, rows read Join meeting / & start Notetaker or Start notes and start the meeting directly. If the previous one is still finishing, Flow shows "Still finishing the last recording. Try again in a moment."

On a reminder pill, Switch, Join + Start, and Start Notetaker respond immediately: the icon swaps for a spinner, the label changes to Switching… or Starting…, and the button is disabled to prevent double-clicks. It returns to normal automatically if the action doesn't complete — for example if you cancel the confirmation, your weekly quota is reached, or the join fails.

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. The week resets Monday on UTC time.

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

• Limit reached: new recordings are blocked. The New note button and the ⌘N and ⌘⇧R shortcuts in the hub are disabled; hovering the button shows the reset date (e.g. "Resets Monday, Aug 10th"). The Flow Bar's record circle still works — tapping it shows a "limit reached" notification. A notification also 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. The button re-enables automatically once the reset time passes.

• 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.

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.

• Brief section (calendar meetings): joining a calendar meeting or opening an upcoming note shows the pre-read from your linked calendar event immediately, in both the hub's embedded recorder and the standalone window. See Limitations and notes for ad-hoc meetings and calendar-sync timing.

• Consent notice: "Always get consent when transcribing others. Learn more" stays visible above the composer for the entire recording. It temporarily hides when the Ask Anything drawer is open, when a footer callout or CTA is showing, or when the smart-prompts row is peeked open — and reappears once those close, or if you stop and restart a recording. "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.

Speaker attribution

Transcript lines can be stamped with participant names when Notetaker can identify who is speaking in your meeting app.

• Google Meet on Mac and Windows (Chrome, Edge, or Brave): named speaker labels appear in the transcript automatically — no browser flags or additional accessibility tools required. Flow picks the active meeting window even if a Meet prejoin or landing tab is also open, follows speaker handoffs quickly, and clears the speaker marker when the active speaker mutes. If the browser blocks accessibility access, recording continues normally and falls back to anonymous speaker labels within about five seconds.

• Zoom and Microsoft Teams: named speaker attribution is supported on Mac, not yet on Windows, where transcript lines use anonymous speaker labels.

• Refined transcript after the meeting: includes speaker names where attribution was available. Assign or correct names from the Transcript tab at any time.

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. When the meeting ends and your mic is released, the recording stops automatically — even if your own voice or echo continues after the call. You'll see an "Auto-ended" notice with a Resume button; tap Resume to continue, or dismiss the notice to leave the recording finalized. If the meeting ended while you were still in the call, you'll see "End of meeting detected, so recording stopped" instead. Recordings are protected during dictation, network reconnects, sleep/wake cycles, and while other participants are still speaking, and are not stopped during the first 90 seconds of a session. 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.

• Check-ins: after extended silence, Notetaker shows a "Notetaker stopping" toast with Keep going and Stop text-link actions — ignoring it stops the recording. About 10 minutes past the scheduled end of a meeting, and again past the one-hour mark, a "Still taking notes" toast appears with the same actions — ignoring either of these keeps recording.

• Maximum length: 30 minutes or 1, 2, or 3 hours, set in Settings → Notetaker (default 2 hours), changeable mid-recording. Before your recording reaches its limit, Flow shows a persistent warning with a live countdown to the exact stop time — 5 minutes ahead for limits of 1 hour or more, 2 minutes ahead for the 30-minute limit. The warning appears either as a dialog in the notepad (when you have that meeting open) or as a card in the Flow Bar, and stays visible until you respond, the recording ends, or the limit is reached. From the warning you can:

  • Extend: opens a picker of longer recording-length options. Selecting one raises the limit immediately, keeps recording, and the warning re-fires before the new limit.

  • End recording: stops the recording right away.

  • Dismiss (X, Escape, or clicking outside): closes the warning and lets the recording continue until the limit, with no second warning.

  At the 3-hour maximum, the warning shows only the countdown, End recording, and a dismiss option, along with a note that the limit has been reached. Recordings stop just under 3 hours to avoid a hard cutoff. All auto-end toasts are full-width and display without the meeting name in the title.

• 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. Deleting the note directly — from the notepad or the Notetaker list in the hub — dismisses this prompt automatically. Silent recordings finish with a "No meaningful audio recorded" message and 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. On Windows, rejoining brings your existing meeting app window (for example, Chrome or Zoom) to the front rather than reopening the conference URL, which prevents duplicate tabs or windows; if Flow can't locate the window, it opens the conference URL instead. 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 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. While regenerating, the meeting shows real-time progress rather than a stale completed state. 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 by app version. If you don't see Notetaker in your app yet, your version hasn't received it.

• Meeting note creation is subject to a weekly limit that varies by plan; upgrading your plan increases your 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.

• Named speaker attribution in Google Meet is supported on Mac and Windows (Chrome, Edge, or Brave). Named attribution for Zoom and Microsoft Teams is supported on Mac only; Windows Zoom and Teams meetings use anonymous speaker labels.

• Recording stops at your configured maximum length (up to 3 hours), set in Settings → Notetaker, after a countdown warning that lets you extend or end early. 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.

• 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, which show no attempt count or elapsed time.

• 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.

• 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.

• On Windows, the running-app picker used in Focus Mode is not available; rejoining activates the existing meeting app window where possible, with a URL fallback.

• The Brief section appears only for calendar-linked meetings. Ad-hoc meetings with no calendar link show no Brief section. If the recorder opens before your calendar finishes syncing, the pre-read may not appear on first load — reopening the meeting picks it up.

• "Copy as Markdown" is briefly disabled while the pre-read loads for a calendar meeting. Older meetings export their pre-read in the note body as before.