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With meeting detection on, Vowen watches which apps are using your microphone. When one of your trigger apps starts a call, a banner appears offering to take notes. You never have to remember to press start. Detection is off by default. Turn it on in Notes settings > Meeting Detection with Auto-detect meetings.

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The detection banner

When a trigger app takes the microphone and keeps it, a compact card appears near the recording indicator. It carries the detected app’s logo, a title reading “Zoom meeting detected” (or the app that was matched), a live status line, and a split Start Recording button.
  • Click Start Recording to begin taking notes with your default summary template.
  • Click the chevron beside it to open a pop-over listing every summary template, with your default ticked. Picking one starts the recording on that template.
  • Click the X, or press Escape, to dismiss.
Choosing a template from the banner applies to that recording only. It does not change your default template. This is different from the chevron on the Start Taking Notes button on the Notes page, which does rewrite your default.
If you ignore the banner it dismisses itself after 30 seconds. Dismissing it, by any route, starts a five minute cooldown for that app, so a call you deliberately chose not to record does not keep asking.

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Trigger apps

Six apps ship as triggers. Each one has its own toggle under Trigger apps in Notes settings > Meeting Detection, and each is on unless you turn it off. Browser calls is one entry rather than one per site. Vowen sees that the browser has the microphone, not which tab is using it, so Google Meet, Zoom Web, Teams Web and anything else in a browser all arrive through this single toggle. Chrome, Chromium, Safari, Firefox, Edge, Brave, Arc, Vivaldi and Opera are all recognized.
FaceTime is deliberately not a trigger app. Its background services hold the microphone even when FaceTime is not open, so it cannot be detected without constant false positives.

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Adding your own

Click Add app under the trigger list to pick any installed application. Added apps get their own row, tagged Added by you, with a toggle and a remove button.

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Apps that are not on the list

Detect other apps controls what happens when an application Vowen does not recognize starts using the microphone. It is on by default, which shows the banner anyway. Turn it off to restrict detection strictly to the apps in the list. System components that open the microphone alongside whichever app actually asked for it, such as the macOS Siri voice trigger, are never counted as an unknown app.

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Vowen never detects itself

Dictating in Vowen, running command mode, or recording meeting notes does not raise a detection banner. Vowen’s own processes are excluded on both sides of the detector: they are ignored when looking for a meeting starting, and never watched for a meeting ending. Vowen’s microphone helpers are excluded too, which is why the level meter in the app no longer produces a phantom “meeting detected” card. This exclusion is not a setting and cannot be turned off.

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Auto-stop when the meeting ends

Auto-stop notes when meeting ends, also in Notes settings > Meeting Detection, watches the other direction. While you are taking notes, Vowen tracks the microphone processes the meeting app had when you started. When they all release the microphone and stay released, the meeting is over.
1

A banner appears

An Ending meeting notes card shows the meeting app’s logo, a countdown reading Ending in 15s, and a progress strip along the bottom edge.
2

Choose, or do nothing

End now stops immediately and skips the rest of the countdown. Keep taking notes, or the X on the corner, cancels the stop and carries on recording. Cancelling re-arms the watch, so it can fire again later in the same session.
3

Otherwise it stops itself

If the countdown runs out, notes stop exactly as if you had pressed stop on the indicator, and the summary is generated normally.
Auto-stop is off by default and is independent of Auto-detect meetings. You can have Vowen stop automatically without having it offer to start automatically, or the other way round.
Auto-stop only fires while notes are actively recording and not paused, and only once per prompt. Brief microphone blips and audio device switches are debounced, so changing your headphones mid-call does not end the recording.

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Requirements and limitations

Auto-detect meetings, auto-stop and the trigger app list are all Pro. The Free plan sees the upgrade prompt.
Detection reads which processes hold the microphone. If macOS has not granted Vowen the permissions it needs, detection cannot see anything. Check Settings > Permissions.
Vowen requires the microphone to stay in use for a couple of seconds before it decides a call has started, so a notification sound or a quick device test does not raise a banner. On Windows, the fallback path scans the process list on a slower cadence than macOS, so the banner can take a little longer to appear.