Why the meeting notes are not written live
Open Meeting Notes during a call and you will see the transcript grow line by line. The notes do not. They are written when you press Stop, or the moment you ask for them. People sometimes report that as a missing feature. It is a decision, and this is the reasoning.
A document that rewrites itself is not a document
Live notes mean re-summarising the meeting every thirty seconds or so. Each pass reorders the points, rewords the summary, promotes something that just came up and demotes something from earlier. You cannot read a paragraph that changes under your eyes, and you would not trust it if you could, because the version you glanced at four minutes ago has already been rewritten twice.
A meeting's shape is only visible at the end. Decisions land in the last ten minutes. A topic discussed for twenty minutes and then dropped should not be in the notes at all, and a live summariser would have written it up three times before it disappeared. An action item's owner is often settled in the "so who takes this?" at the close. Writing the notes once, from the whole transcript, is how the notes get to say "None." under decisions with confidence, or "Unassigned" beside an item, instead of guessing early and correcting late.
What is live instead
The transcript. Every line, stamped with the time it was said, in two labels, you and them, as the call goes on. If you need to check what was just said, it is there.
And Assist, which is the live mode. When the other side asks a question, a suggested answer appears without being asked; hover any line in the transcript and answer that one; ask for a shorter or a more detailed version in one press. Assist is built for the moments during a call when you need something now. Meeting Notes is built for the write-up. You can run both on the same call, each in its own session.
There is also the summarize button, which is the part people miss. "Not live" means "not continuous". It does not mean "not until the end". Press summarize at any point and you get the notes so far, as a document you can read, at a moment you chose because something worth reading had happened. That is a snapshot on demand, which is a different thing from a document that never settles.
What Stop does
Stop writes the output you chose for this meeting: notes by default, or full minutes, a cleaned transcript, or chapters, with the other three a click away afterwards. A long meeting is longer than most models can read at once, so it is read in passes, the panel says which pass it is on, and if the meeting outruns what one set of notes can cover, the result says it covers the most recent stretch rather than presenting itself as the whole thing. When something has to go, it is the oldest speech, because decisions land at the end.
Some edges are handled so that you do not have to think about them. Stopping twice does not stack a second, identical set of notes; only new speech since the last set counts. A run you cancel halfway keeps nothing and leaves the meeting ready to summarise again. If you pressed Stop too early, Continue listening picks the same session back up. And if the calendar started the recording, the countdown at the end writes the meeting up on its way out when nobody answers, so nothing is lost either way.
Why the end is when the model does its best work
A model reading the whole transcript can classify the session before it writes: a meeting, a lecture, a one-on-one, an interview, a sales call. A lecture has no decisions and no owners, and notes that force "decisions" onto it manufacture action items out of "read chapter four". You cannot tell a lecture from a meeting five minutes in. You can at the end.
The same goes for names. The transcript cannot tell voices apart, so an action item gets an owner only where the meeting made it clear, and that clarity usually arrives late. Written live, the notes would attribute early and wrongly. Written once, they attribute where they can and say Unassigned where they cannot.
The cost, honestly
You cannot glance at a running summary. If you want the notes so far, you press a button. That is one click, and we think it is the right click, because it means the document in front of you was written at a moment you chose, from everything said up to then, and it will not change until you ask again. The rest of what Meeting Notes does, and does not do, is on the Meeting Notes page; why nothing joins the call is the other half of the same design.
