# Meeting Notes !!!warning Notaday Pro Meeting Notes and live transcription require an active **Notaday Pro** plan and the Notaday macOS app. !!! Meeting Notes helps you stay present while Notaday listens in the background. Start a recording from the Scratchpad, watch the live transcript appear as the meeting continues, add your own notes, and save a structured AI summary when you're done. It is designed for calls, planning sessions, customer conversations, and any meeting where you want a reliable written record without typing everything yourself. ## Local Transcription And Privacy Live transcription uses local voice-to-text processing on your Mac. The recorded audio is not sent to a cloud transcription service, and the voice-to-text step happens on the device where you are running the Notaday macOS app. That means your meeting audio stays on your local device while it is being recorded and transcribed. When you choose to create and save the final meeting note, Notaday uses the transcript and your own notes to prepare the written summary. ## What You Can Capture During a recording, Notaday can keep track of: - **Your voice** from the microphone. - **Other speakers** from system audio, such as people in a video call. - **Your own notes**, written manually while the meeting is happening. - **A live transcript**, shown in the Scratchpad as the conversation unfolds. The transcript is meant to help you follow along and review what was said. You can still edit the final notes before saving them. ## Before Your First Recording Meeting Notes works from the Notaday macOS app. If you have not installed it yet, download it from the [macOS app section in the Notaday docs](../guides/get-more-out-of-notaday.md#download-the-macos-app). The first time you use live transcription, macOS may ask for access to your microphone and system audio. Allow both so Notaday can capture your voice and the other people in the meeting. If access is missing, the Scratchpad shows a permission message before you start recording. ## Start A Recording 1. Open the Notaday macOS app. 2. Open the **Scratchpad**. 3. Choose a channel if you want the meeting note to belong to a specific area. 4. Select **Start recording**. 5. Keep the Scratchpad open while you talk, or move it aside and return to it when you want to check the transcript. While recording, the Scratchpad shows the current status, elapsed time, audio activity, your notes, and the live transcript. ## Use Your Own Notes During The Meeting The notes field is for anything you want the final summary to pay special attention to: - Decisions that matter. - Names, dates, or follow-ups you do not want to miss. - Your own interpretation of what was agreed. - Questions to revisit later. Your notes are included when Notaday prepares the meeting summary. They help the result reflect what mattered to you, not only what appeared in the transcript. ## Review The Live Transcript The transcript appears as short lines while the recording is running. Speaker labels help you distinguish between what you said and what others said. Live transcription is optimized for speed, so lines may appear in small pieces or be split across several turns. That is normal. The saved meeting note gives you a cleaner place to review, edit, and keep the final result. ## Stop And Create Meeting Notes When the meeting is over: 1. Select **Stop recording**. 2. Wait for Notaday to prepare the meeting summary. 3. Review the title, channel, summary, tags, and action items. 4. Edit anything that should be clearer. 5. Select **Save**. Notaday then saves the meeting as a meeting note. You can find it later in your recorded meetings and, when linked, from the related journal view. ## Action Items If Notaday finds follow-up work in the meeting, it can suggest action items. Review them before saving: - Keep the ones you want to track. - Remove anything that is not actually a task. - Add or adjust due dates when needed. Only the action items you accept are saved. ## If Something Goes Wrong If the summary cannot be created or saved right away, Notaday keeps the draft information locally so you can try again without losing the transcript and notes. If the recording does not start, check that microphone and system audio access are allowed in macOS, then return to the Scratchpad and try again. ## Good To Know - Meeting Notes is best used in the macOS app, not the browser. - You can select a channel before recording, but you can still review the final note before saving. - The live transcript is a working transcript, not the final word. Use the review step to clean up names, details, and wording. - Your own notes are especially useful for decisions and next steps, because they tell Notaday what you considered important during the meeting.