Meeting notes that never leave your Mac.
No bot joins your call. No account. Nothing uploaded. Dictera hears both sides through macOS itself and writes the notes locally - so you can take notes in the meetings the other tools aren't allowed in.
Free 14-day trial · No account needed · macOS 26 or later
How a meeting goes
Start listening when the call begins. The transcript builds live on the left. Press Stop and the notes are written - or press summarize at any point and get them mid-meeting.
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.
Your mic starts muted
Turn Mic on when your own voice should be part of the notes. The panel shows which state you're in throughout.
Pause and resume safely
Stopping twice won't stack a second, identical set of notes - only new speech since the last set counts.
Cancel costs you nothing
A run you stop halfway keeps nothing and leaves the meeting ready to summarize again. Half a set of notes is worth nothing.
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.
Notes
The outcome: summary, decisions, action items, open questions. Written automatically when you press Stop.
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.
Six shapes, detected automatically
Meeting, lecture or talk, one-on-one, interview, sales call - or pick one yourself. The notes state which shape they used, so a wrong guess is one click from fixed.
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.
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 asks you who's in the room, then uses those names only where the meeting itself makes it clear.
Meeting Setup
Name the other participants, say who you are, add any background. Kept between meetings, because the ones you record are mostly the recurring ones.
"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
The panel says which pass it's on, and the menu tells you how many a given output will take before you commit to it.
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.
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. Connection tests fill the window in automatically.
Afterwards
The meeting doesn't disappear when the notes are written.
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.
Save as Markdown
Notes, minutes, transcript and chapters all export to a file - with the date, the participants and the model that wrote them - plus copy buttons for each.
Searchable archive
Sessions are listed, searchable and renameable, with a title generated for each. Or switch history off and nothing is written at all.
Stays on this Mac
Transcripts, notes and any screenshots live in your Application Support folder and are deleted with the session. Nothing is synced anywhere.
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 you listed the participants 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 press Stop, or when you ask for 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 join meetings from my calendar?
No. There's no calendar integration and nothing runs unattended. You press Start.
Is it really all on-device?
With the built-in model, yes - transcription is Apple's on-device speech engine and the notes are written by a local model. If you point Meeting Notes at a cloud provider instead, the transcript window and any screenshots go to that provider on each pass. The app tells you before you switch. See Security & data handling for the full picture.
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.
For the meetings other tools aren't allowed in.
Included with every plan, unlimited during the 14-day trial.