Meeting notes with no bot in the call.
Dictera hears both sides through macOS itself and writes the meeting up on the notch's Meetings page. No bot joins, there's no account, and with the built-in model - the default - the transcript and the notes stay on your Mac.
Free 14-day trial · No account needed · macOS 26 or later
How a meeting goes
Open Meetings in the notch. The day's meetings are on the left - from your calendar, plus any recording none of them names - with Today, Previous day and Next day to step through, and Meeting History for every one before. Pick a meeting and its Notes, Transcript and Setup are on the right.
Join and record from one row
A meeting that's on now or about to start has Record, and Join whenever the invite has a call link - so the call and its notes start from the same place. For a call nobody scheduled, press Record a Meeting at the top of the list.
Or from any app
Switch on Record a Meeting, ⌥⇧⌘R, in Settings ▸ Shortcut. Press it to start recording, and again to stop and write the meeting up. Or hold the AI Assistant button in the notch and choose Meeting Notes.
Nothing joins your call
The other participants are captured with a Core Audio process tap - the same audio you're already hearing. No invite, no bot in the participant list, no Screen Recording permission, and the call keeps playing normally.
One click mutes you
Your microphone starts on, so what you commit to reaches the action items. Turn Mic off when your own voice shouldn't be part of the notes; the Meetings page and the notch show which state you're in.
Stop, and it's written
The write-up appears on the Notes tab when you stop recording - or press the button above it at any point and get it mid-meeting.
Pause and resume safely
Continue recording carries on where the transcript left off, and stopping twice won't stack a second, identical set of notes - only new speech since the last set counts.
Cancel costs you nothing
A write-up you stop halfway keeps nothing and leaves the meeting ready to write up again. Half a set of notes is worth nothing.
Or let the calendar bring it up
The meetings people forget to record are the ones that started while they were still finding the window. Connect your calendar - read-only, from the accounts already in Calendar, with no second sign-in - and the notch counts down to each meeting, then asks whether to record it as it starts.
Five minutes out, on the notch
For the last five minutes before a meeting, the notch counts down to it. Point at it to join the call, if the invite has a link, or to record it.
A question, not a recording
Shortly before the start, a card drops out of the notch: Record now or Skip, and Join when there's a call link. If you don't answer, nothing is recorded. Set a meeting, or every meeting, to Record automatically and it starts by itself - and Dictera shows you that it has.
Never without showing you
If the question can't be put on screen, nothing records. Skip the same meeting twice and Dictera stops asking about that one.
The invite fills in Setup
Who was invited becomes the participant list action items are attributed against, without retyping it every week. Email addresses are never stored, and the names reach only models on your Mac unless you switch on "Send attendee names to remote engines".
Linked to the right meeting
A recording started from a meeting belongs to it from the first word. One you started yourself is matched to the calendar when it stops - but only when it's clear which meeting it was. Two meetings back to back usually aren't, so nothing is attached and you pick, with Attach on the Meetings page. Changing or deleting an event later never changes a recording you already made.
Optional, and read-only
The welcome tour offers Calendar as an optional permission, and granting it connects your calendar. Skip it and nothing is read until you switch it on in Settings ▸ Calendar, or press Connect Calendar on the Meetings page. Dictera never writes an event and never puts a bot in a meeting.
Four things it can write
The same recording, at four levels of fidelity. What separates them is only what each is allowed to throw away - so pick the one that matches why you recorded. The button above the notes writes whichever this meeting is set to, and so does stopping; Other write-ups has the other three, each with what it costs.
Notes
The outcome: summary, decisions, action items, open questions.
Full minutes
The whole meeting in order - every point, argument and figure - at roughly a third of the length. Not a summary.
Transcript
The actual words, cleaned of disfluencies and mis-hearings, in the language they were spoken. Never translated, never condensed.
Chapters
The shape of the meeting: a timeline of what was discussed when, with times taken from the transcript rather than estimated.
Notes that match the session
A lecture has no decisions and no owners. Forcing "summary / decisions / action items" onto one manufactures action items out of "read chapter four" - so Dictera reads each recording for what it actually is.
Five shapes, detected automatically
Meeting, lecture or talk, one-on-one, interview, sales or customer call - or pick one yourself under Notes shape. The notes state which shape they used, so a wrong guess is one change away.
Decisions are never quietly dropped
Sections that matter say "None." rather than vanishing, so you can tell "nothing was decided" from "the model forgot".
Reshape in one press
Cut to Action items, reorganize By topic, or turn the notes into a Recap email - a finished deliverable, not a draft. Lectures also offer Key terms and a Study guide.
Not offered where it would lie
Rewrites are deliberately unavailable on the transcript and chapters. A reshaped transcript is no longer a record.
Or edit it yourself
A write-up is a document, not a reply. Fix a misheard name, drop a line nobody agreed to, add what the model missed - without regenerating the nine-tenths that were right. The model's own version is kept so Revert works months later, and the exported file discloses that a human edited it.
Who said what, honestly
Everyone except you arrives on a single audio channel, so the transcript can't tell voices apart. Dictera doesn't pretend otherwise - it works from who you say is in the room, then uses those names only where the meeting itself makes it clear.
The Setup tab
Name the other participants, say who you are, add any background - or let the calendar invite fill it in. New meetings start from your defaults, so a recurring one is typed once; from the first edit the setup is that meeting's own, and reopening an old meeting shows the people who were actually in it.
"Unassigned", not a guess
An action item whose owner the transcript never establishes is written as Unassigned. This is a rule in the prompt, not a hope.
Background fixes proper nouns
Project, product and people names the transcriber mangles come out right once they're in the setup.
No voice fingerprinting
Dictera never builds a voiceprint of anyone. Attribution is inference from names spoken aloud, and nothing else.
Long meetings
An hour-long call is longer than most models can read at once. Rather than truncating quietly, Dictera reads it in passes and tells you what it covered.
Read in passes
Other write-ups tells you how many passes each output will take before you commit to it, and the notes button says so too.
It says when it fell short
If a meeting outruns what one set of notes can cover, the result is labelled as the most recent stretch rather than presented as the whole thing.
The end is what's kept
When something has to go, it's the oldest speech - because decisions land at the end of a meeting.
It won't run all afternoon
A recording that outlives its meeting gets a one-minute countdown and a Keep recording button. Unanswered, it stops - and writes the meeting up on the way out. One with no meeting behind it is asked about after an hour by default, calendar or not.
A bigger window covers more
Point Meeting Notes at a model with a larger context window and the same call is read in fewer passes.
Afterwards
The meeting doesn't disappear when the notes are written - and neither does the series it belongs to.
Ask it about the meeting
Type a question and Dictera finds the passage that answers it, even in a two-hour call - and says plainly when the transcript doesn't settle it, instead of concluding from silence.
What the whole series still owes
Every open action item across every meeting filed under one series, in one list in Settings ▸ History. It reads back the notes you already have - no model runs, so it can't invent a commitment - and it says so when some meetings couldn't be read.
Save as Markdown, or copy
Notes, minutes, transcript and chapters each save to a Markdown file - with the date, the participants and the model that wrote them - and each has its own Copy button.
Meeting History
Every meeting, searchable, filed by series and titled automatically. Select several to file or delete them at once.
Kept as long as you choose
Transcripts, notes and any screenshots live in your Application Support folder and are deleted with the session. Keep them forever - the default - or for 30 days, 90 days or a year, or switch off Save Assistant Sessions and nothing is written at all. Nothing is synced anywhere.
Your notes stay out of your screen share
The Meetings page is drawn in a window that macOS keeps out of screen sharing - always, whatever the eye in the notch is set to - and while the notch asks about a meeting or a meeting is being recorded, the notch keeps out of shares and recordings too.
Kept out of screen sharing and recordings by apps that respect the window privacy setting in macOS. See acceptable use.
What it doesn't do.
Does it label each participant separately?
No. Everyone but you shares one audio channel, so the transcript has two labels: you, and them. Names appear only where the participants are listed - typed by you or read from the calendar invite - and the meeting makes clear who is speaking. There is no voice fingerprinting.
Are the notes written live?
No - only the transcript is live. The notes are written when you stop recording, or when you press the button above them. That's deliberate: a set of notes that rewrites itself every thirty seconds isn't a document you can read.
Does it handle a multilingual meeting?
Each session transcribes in one language that you choose. The assistant doesn't auto-detect mid-call, so a meeting where people switch language is transcribed in the one you picked. Automatic detection is available for dictation - it's a different pipeline.
Can I play back the audio?
No. Dictera never writes the audio to disk - the only artifacts are the transcript and what you generate from it. Timestamps tell you when something was said; there's no recording to scrub through.
Will it record meetings from my calendar?
It will never join one - there's no bot, and Dictera never writes to your calendar. If you connect Calendar, Dictera asks shortly before each meeting whether to record it, and if nobody answers, nothing is recorded. A meeting records by itself only if you set it, or every meeting, to Record automatically - and then it shows you that it has started. Nothing starts without being shown first, and skipping the same meeting twice stops Dictera asking about that one. Calendar is optional: the welcome tour offers it, and you can connect it later in Settings ▸ Calendar.
What does Dictera read from my calendar?
The title, the time, whether it repeats, the names on the invite and its call link - read from the accounts already set up in Calendar, so there's no second sign-in and no separate connector. Access is read-only. Email addresses are never stored at all, and attendee names reach only models on your Mac unless you switch on sending them to remote engines. You choose which calendars count.
Is it really all on-device?
With the built-in model, the default, yes - transcription is Apple's on-device speech engine and the notes are written by a model on your Mac. If you point Meeting Notes at a cloud provider instead, the meeting's transcript and what you ask about it go to that provider, and so does a finished session's transcript for its title and summary. The app says so when you set one up, and Privacy Details in About lists where everything goes. See Security & data handling for the full picture.
Will my notes show up in a screen share?
No. The Meetings page is drawn in a window that macOS keeps out of screen sharing and recordings - always, whatever the eye in the notch is set to - in apps that respect the window privacy setting in macOS. A share sees at most an empty frame where the page is.
Do I need to tell people I'm taking notes?
Recording laws vary and some places require everyone's consent. Dictera captures the audio your Mac is already playing, but that doesn't change your obligations - check what applies where you and the other participants are. It matters more if you set meetings to record automatically: the meeting then opens with a recording running that you didn't press Record on.
For the meetings other tools aren't allowed in.
Included with every plan. Free for 14 days with everything unlocked, then one subscription covers the notch, dictation and the AI Assistant.