Meeting notes without a bot on the call

What is wrong with a bot on the call

Meeting note services usually work like this: a bot joins the call, listens and later sends a transcript. The approach has downsides:

• the bot is visible to everyone, and people act differently or ask to remove it;
• not every call service lets bots in, and messengers usually do not at all;
• the call audio goes to the note service’s servers;
• the summary follows their template, not yours.

The alternative: record the audio on your own computer, transcribe it locally and hand the summary to the agent you already use.

Record the call on your Mac

In Hedoq, meeting recording starts from the notch by the camera:

1. Hover the notch and press “Record meeting”.
2. Answer “How many people?”: from 2 to 10. It helps tell the voices apart.
3. Talk as usual, in any call app. The notch shows that recording is on, with a clock.
4. When the call ends, press Stop.

Hedoq records two tracks: your microphone and the system audio, which carries the other voices. Nobody joins the call, and the call app knows nothing about the recording.

Before the first recording you need three things: voice input (installs with one button), microphone access and the macOS “Screen & System Audio Recording” permission. If something is missing, Hedoq says exactly what.

The transcript by speaker stays on your Mac

During the call the audio is only written to a file. Transcription starts after Stop and runs on the Mac itself; the audio is never uploaded.

Lines are labelled by role: “Me” for the Mac owner and “Other side” for the rest. With more than two people, the others are numbered by voice: “Other side 1”, “Other side 2”. A machine splits the voices and can get it wrong, which is worth keeping in mind when you read.

A “Meeting recording” folder with the date and time appears on your desktop. Inside:

• the transcript as text;
• the call recording in m4a;
• the summary, once the agent writes it.

Hedoq deletes nothing from that folder. If the recording is empty or has no speech, no summary is written.

For a cleaner transcript:

• wear headphones, so the other voices do not reach your microphone a second time through the speakers;
• give the real number of participants, since the recording is split into that many voices;
• ask everyone to say their name at the start, so the agent can put names into the summary;
• add terms and project names to “Dictation vocabulary” in the settings; it helps here too.

Your agent writes the summary

After transcription Hedoq opens a Claude session, and the agent reads the whole conversation. A Summary.md appears in the same folder and opens right in Hedoq. The summary has a fixed shape:

1. What the meeting was about: a line or two.
2. What was discussed.
3. What was decided.
4. Who does what: task, owner, deadline.
5. Dates and deadlines as a separate list.
6. Open questions.

The rules for the agent are strict: make nothing up, invent no names, mark a doubtful word or number with a question mark. If someone was called by name during the call, the summary uses the name instead of “Other side”.

Keep in mind: the transcription itself happens on the Mac, but the text for the summary is read by the model of your subscription, like any other request you send to Claude.

What to do with the summary next

The summary lives in a Claude session, so you can keep working with it in the same conversation:

• ask for a follow-up email to the participants;
• split the tasks by owner or move them to your tracker;
• check what exactly was said about a deadline, with a pointer to the place in the transcript;
• compare it with the summary of the last meeting in the folder next to it.

One more rule no app replaces: tell the other side you are recording the call. It is a matter of trust, and in some countries a matter of law.