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Every meeting note has an Ask AI tab. Ask questions about the meeting, and the assistant can rewrite the note’s summary and title when you ask it to. Every conversation is saved.
This is Ask AI on a meeting note. The same conversation surface exists on manual transcriptions, documented separately in Ask AI for transcriptions. Meeting notes add live questions during recording, context cards, and summary editing.

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Where it lives

Open any note from the Notes page. The tab row across the top of the note is: The composer is docked below the note on every tab, not just Ask AI. Type a question while you are reading the Summary, press Enter, and Vowen brings the Ask AI tab forward with the answer. It is the same box, the same draft and the same conversation wherever you ask from.

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Asking a question

1

Open a note and start typing

The composer sits under the note on every tab. Enter sends, Shift+Enter adds a newline.
2

Or pick a starter

An empty conversation offers five starters: Summarize the key points, What decisions were made?, List the action items, What is still unresolved? and Draft a follow-up email. Clicking one sends it immediately.
3

Read the answer

Answers stream in. A jump-to-bottom button appears if you scroll away mid-stream.

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Composer shortcuts

  • Type / at the start of the box to open the command menu. It holds the same five starters.
  • Type @ at a word boundary to attach a context source.
  • The button on the right of the toolbar shows which AI provider will answer. Click it to switch.

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Saved conversations

Every conversation is kept. On the Ask AI tab, the note’s right sidebar gains a Chats section listing them newest first, grouped as Today, Yesterday, Previous 7 days and Older.
The plus button in the Chats header opens a fresh conversation and puts the caret in the composer. The unsaved conversation shows up in the list as New conversation until you ask something.
Hover a row and click the pencil. The title is edited in place: Enter commits, Escape cancels, and clicking away commits as well. Titles are capped at 64 characters. Clearing the field hands the title back to being derived automatically from your first question.
The trash icon on a row asks for confirmation, then removes the conversation permanently.
Once a note has five or more conversations, a search box appears above the list. It matches on the conversation title and on the last message.
Conversations live in chat-threads.json in Vowen’s application data folder, separate from the note itself. Each is scoped to one note, so one note’s conversations never appear on another. Deleting the note deletes its conversations. Vowen keeps up to 100 conversations per note and 240 messages per conversation, dropping the oldest beyond that.

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Context cards

Above the composer, small cards show exactly what the assistant can read for the next question.
  • Summary and Transcript are both attached by default.
  • A card only exists if the note actually has that content.
  • Each card shows its size: word count for the summary, block count for the transcript.
  • Click the X on a card to detach it. Detaching the transcript is the usual reason to do this, on a long meeting where you only want the assistant working from the summary.
  • Click Add context, or type @, to attach something back.
The open tab does not decide the grounding. Switching from Summary to Transcript does not change what the assistant can see. Only the cards do.

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Attachments

The paperclip button attaches one image or PDF to the next question. The file picker accepts image/* and .pdf, with a 10 MB limit. Images need an AI model that can read images. Attachment contents are sent with the question but are not written to disk with the conversation. Reopening an old conversation shows that a file was attached, and its name, but not the file itself.

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Reasoning

When the model streams its reasoning, Ask AI shows a collapsible block above the answer, labeled Thinking while it runs and Thought for 4.2s once it finishes. It stays open while the reasoning is the only thing happening and collapses when the answer lands. Click the header to reopen it. Nothing here turns a reasoning mode on. The block appears only for models that already emit reasoning as part of their response, such as DeepSeek, OpenRouter and Gemini. Models that do not emit it render no block and cost nothing extra.

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Editing the note by asking

Ask AI can change two things about the note: its summary and its title. Ask for a change in plain language:
  • “Translate the summary to English”
  • “Make the notes shorter”
  • “Rewrite the summary as bullet points”
  • “Rename this note to Q3 pricing review”
The assistant writes one short line of acknowledgement, and the new value lands in the note itself rather than in the chat. A row appears under the answer reading Summary updated or Title updated, with an Undo button next to it. Asking a question about the note is not a change. The assistant only edits when you actually ask it to.
Undo only lasts for the session. The previous value is held in memory, not written to disk, so once you close the note or restart the app the Undo button on an older turn is gone. The change itself is saved the moment it is applied, exactly like an edit you typed by hand.

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The transcript is read-only

The transcript is the record of what was actually said, and Ask AI can never write to it. Ask it to edit the transcript and it will say so plainly and offer to change the summary instead. If you need to change the transcript, edit it directly on the Transcript tab.

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Notes on summary rewrites

Summary editing is offered only when the note has a summary and is not still recording. On a note with no summary yet, use the Regenerate button on the Summary tab instead.
If your summary carries citation anchors, the assistant is told to carry every one across unchanged, and is given them as an explicit checklist. Anchors it invents are stripped before the new summary reaches the note, so a rewritten summary can never gain a timestamp pill that points at a moment nobody chose. An anchor on a line the rewrite deletes goes with it.
Editing is not provider tool calling. The model writes the complete new value between in-band markers of the form <<<VOWEN_EDIT:summary>>> ... <<<VOWEN_EDIT:end>>>, and Vowen filters that block out of the stream as it arrives, so you never see the markers. This is why editing works on every provider Vowen supports, including ones with no function-calling channel and the non-streaming fallbacks. A block the model never finishes, because it was cut off or you pressed stop, is discarded rather than half-applied.

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Asking during the meeting

Ask questions while a meeting is still recording, from two places:
  • The hover card on the floating recording indicator, on its Ask AI tab.
  • The meeting panel, on its Ask tab, opened with Cmd+\ on macOS or Ctrl+\ on Windows.
Each question pulls in the latest transcript, so follow-ups stay in sync as the conversation moves. Screenshots you capture from the panel are attached to your next question as visual context, if the selected model can read images. The live conversation is saved with the meeting itself and is shared between the indicator card and the panel, so a question asked in one shows up in the other. Clear chat in the panel erases it.
The note detail page does not offer Ask AI while that note is still recording. During a recording it shows the live transcript instead. Ask from the panel or the indicator.

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Live Ask without real-time transcription

Live Ask works without a streaming transcription engine. For every meeting, Vowen runs a second 16 kHz mono recorder alongside the main one and buffers its audio to a temporary file. When you ask a question and no live transcript is available, Vowen transcribes only the span of audio since your last question and appends it before answering. Two questions ten minutes apart cost exactly one transcription of those ten minutes, never a re-run of the whole meeting. The buffer file is deleted when the meeting ends. Spans shorter than about 1.5 seconds are left alone and roll into the next one, so a question asked moments after the previous one does not send a fragment of a word to the model.
The Ask AI tab is offered whether or not real-time transcription is on. With it off, a short banner on the Transcript tab explains what is happening: “Real-time transcription is off — this fills in each time you ask a question.”

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The Catch up button

On the note detail page, while that note is recording, the recording bar carries a Catch up button whenever the catch-up buffer is in use. It runs the same transcription a question would trigger, without you having to ask one, so the live pane fills in on demand. While it runs the button reads Catching up… and is disabled. Catch up exists only on the note detail page’s recording bar. The meeting panel and the floating indicator show the explanatory banner instead and fill in when you ask a question.

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Requirements

Ask AI is a Pro feature, on both the note page and live during a meeting. It also needs an AI provider configured under Configure your AI in the sidebar. With no provider set up, the tab shows “No AI provider configured”.
Live Ask answers with the meeting’s own AI Summary Model from the Notes settings, falling back to your global provider when no override is set. On the note page you pick the provider from the composer’s model button.