Every way to start a meeting recording, what gets captured, and how to control a session in progress.
AI provider required for summaries. The recording and transcript work on their own, but the AI summary that follows needs a configured provider. Set one up under Configure your AI.
Before you start, check your defaults under the gear (“Notes settings”) at the top right of the Notes page. The Recording Defaults tab holds the microphone, transcription model, language, Identify Speakers, AI summary provider and default template.
Open the Notes page and click Start Taking Notes in the top right. Recording begins immediately, using your default template.
Start Taking Notes sits at the top right of the Notes page. The chevron on its right edge is a separate control.
The button is a split button: the chevron on its right opens a Default template menu.
Picking a template from that chevron menu does not start a recording, and it does not apply to just the next meeting. It rewrites your global default template for every future recording. To use a template once without changing your default, start from the meeting detection banner instead.
The menu also has a Manage templates row, which opens Notes settings on the Templates tab.
The tray or menu bar
Open the Vowen tray icon (Windows) or menu bar icon (macOS) and click Start Meeting Notes. The item only appears when nothing is recording. Once a session is running it is replaced by Pause Meeting Notes and Stop Meeting Notes.This is the only visible control when the floating indicator is turned off.
A keyboard shortcut
The shortcut is listed as Start New Note in Settings > Shortcuts. The default is Cmd+Shift+N on macOS and Alt+N on Windows and Linux, but it is off by default, so you have to enable it before it does anything.
Pressing the shortcut again does not stop the recording. Use the indicator, the tray, or the in-app stop control to stop. See stopping a recording.
The meeting detection banner
When Vowen notices you have joined a call, it raises a banner reading “[App] meeting detected” carrying the detected app’s own logo. Click Start Recording to begin, or dismiss it with the close chip (Esc).The Start button here is also a split button, and its chevron opens a Template menu. Unlike the Notes page button, picking a template here starts the recording immediately with that template applied to this session only. Your global default is untouched.Meeting detection is a Pro feature and is configured per app. See Meeting detection.
The idle pill
When the floating pill is idle on screen, it carries a New note button. Click it to start recording. Hovering it for a moment opens a template picker, plus a Manage templates row.
A watch folder
A folder can be watched so that any audio or video file dropped into it is turned into a finished meeting note automatically, with the same transcription, summary and integrations as a live recording. See Watch folders.
System audio: everything playing through your speakers or headphones, including the other participants and any shared audio
Microphone: what you say during the meeting
Both streams are combined into a single recording for transcription. No bot joins the call and no banner is shown to other participants.System audio capture is controlled per template by its Capture system audio setting. Turning it off makes the template microphone-only, which is what you want for a dictated voice memo but not for a call. See Templates.Your machine is also prevented from sleeping for the duration of the recording, and regular push-to-talk dictation keeps working alongside an active meeting session.
The When recording starts option under Settings > Recording, which can mute system audio or pause whatever is playing, applies to dictation recordings only. It does not fire for meeting notes, where silencing the call would remove the other participants from the recording.
On macOS, Vowen runs the meeting microphone through an echo-cancelling capture path so the other participants coming out of your speakers are not also picked up by your mic. There is no toggle for this. It is always on where it can be, and it falls back silently to the ordinary microphone where it cannot.It applies when all of the following hold:
You are on macOS 14 or later. Both Intel and Apple silicon are supported.
The template has Capture system audio on. With system audio off, the bleed through your microphone is the only record of the far end, so cancelling it would throw away half the meeting.
Your input device actually has an acoustic echo path. Vowen disables cancellation automatically on headphones, Bluetooth devices, and and virtual or combined audio devices.
If you change your audio output mid-meeting, the capture path is rebuilt around the new device.
The microphone used for meetings is set on the Recording Defaults tab of Notes settings, under Microphone.By default, meetings follow your global microphone ranking, and the row reads “(Global default)”. Vowen walks that ranked list and uses the first device that is actually present, so unplugging a headset falls through to the next choice rather than failing.
Until you click Customize, the Microphone row names the device meetings inherit from the global ranking.
Give meetings their own separate order:
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Click Customize
This forks a copy of your global order for meetings. It does not open an editor.
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Click Edit order
Now that a meetings-specific list exists, Edit order opens the Microphone — Meetings reorder dialog. Changes you make to the global list from this point on no longer affect meetings.
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Click Use global to revert
This discards the meetings-specific order and goes back to following the global one. Vowen asks for confirmation first.
Once meetings have their own list, Customize is replaced by these two buttons.
While a note is recording, a floating pill sits in the corner of your screen. Pause and Stop are always visible on it, and the pill does not change size when you hover it.At rest it shows:
A live level meter, so you can see at a glance that audio is actually arriving
An ambient glow around the pill
A status label reading Recording or Paused
An elapsed timer
The Pause and Stop buttons
Hovering the pill opens a card below it, without resizing the pill itself. The card has:
A Mark important button, with a count badge once you have used it
A Capture screen for AI context button, with a count badge once you have captured something
You can drag the pill anywhere and it remembers where you put it. Hovering is deliberately disarmed for the first couple of seconds after the pill appears, so it never pops open on its own as you move the cursor away.To hide it, turn off Show floating indicator while recording on the Recording Defaults tab of Notes settings.
Turning the indicator off also disables the meeting panel and its shortcut, because the panel is an extension of the indicator. If you toggle it off mid-meeting, an already-open panel closes.
The indicator at rest: level meter, status label, elapsed time, and Pause and Stop always on show.
Turn on Show real-time transcription preview on the Recording Defaults tab of Notes settings to stream live text into the meeting notes page while you record. It is off by default.
This is a different setting from Real-time transcription preview under Settings > Recording. That one is the preview for push-to-talk dictation and has no effect on meeting notes.
The preview needs a transcription model that can stream. If your selected model cannot, the setting explains that no preview will appear. The final transcript is generated when you stop either way, so the preview never changes what you end up with.
Use the Notes tab on the indicator’s hover card (or on the meeting panel) to jot quick context for the AI while the meeting is happening, such as “this is a follow-up to last week’s pricing call” or “Priya is the new PM”. The text auto-saves and is fed into the summary prompt after the recording stops.Everything you write here is kept on the note and stays editable afterwards on its My Notes tab. See working with a note.
Press the Capture screen for AI context button on the indicator or the meeting panel to attach a screenshot to the note. Screenshots are handed to the summarizer as vision context, so a shared slide or a diagram on screen can inform the summary.
Manual only. Vowen never captures your screen on a timer or in the background. Every screenshot is one you pressed a button for.
It captures the display your cursor is currently on, not the primary display. Move your pointer onto the screen you want before pressing.
Your mouse cursor is excluded from the image, and no shutter sound plays.
macOS uses the system screencapture tool, which needs Screen Recording permission. Windows captures at the display’s native pixel size so text stays legible for vision models. Linux is not supported, and the button reports “Not supported on this platform”.
The button carries a count badge showing how many screenshots are attached.
Screenshots are dropped when your summary provider is a CLI agent such as Claude Code or Codex, which read a single text prompt and are deliberately run without filesystem access.
Press Mark important to stamp the current point in the meeting. Each mark records the elapsed timestamp, and when real-time transcription is running it also captures a short excerpt of what was just said.Marked moments are injected into the summary prompt with an instruction to give them extra weight, so they show up prominently in the finished summary. The button carries a count badge, and its tooltip reports how many moments you have marked.
Both buttons keep a running count — here, two marked moments and three screenshots.
The indicator’s hover card is the compact surface. For a full-size in-meeting view with larger tabs and its own shortcut, see the meeting panel. For asking questions during or after a meeting, see Ask AI.
Pause and resume are available on every plan. No audio is captured while paused, and the indicator’s timer freezes so the on-screen state always matches what is actually being recorded. Live preview and Ask AI’s catch-up buffer pause with it.
Paused: the level meter flattens, the glow goes out, and Pause becomes a play button.
Vowen can notice when your meeting app turns off the microphone, meaning the call ended, and stop recording for you. An Ending meeting notes banner appears with a 15-second countdown and two buttons:
End now stops immediately and processes the note
Keep taking notes cancels the auto-stop and keeps recording. Vowen re-arms detection for the next time the mic is released.
If you do not respond, recording stops when the countdown finishes.
The countdown banner. Keep taking notes cancels the auto-stop; End now skips the rest of the countdown.
Turn it on with Auto-stop notes when meeting ends on the Meeting Detection tab of Notes settings. It is off by default.
The recording is transcribed with your selected model. This takes a moment for longer meetings. You can regenerate the transcript later with a different model.
2
AI summary
The transcript, along with any context notes, marked moments and screenshots, is sent to your AI provider and summarized using your selected template. If the first attempt fails, Vowen retries automatically.
3
Storage
The note is saved with its transcript, summary and audio file, and appears in the Notes section. See working with a note.
Click Import on the Notes page to turn a pre-recorded audio or video file into a full meeting note, transcript and summary included, exactly as if you had recorded it live. The Import Audio / Video dialog accepts drag-and-drop or a file browser, and takes several files at once. Each file becomes its own note.The dialog has an optional Meeting date field. Leave it empty to use the current time, or set it to when the meeting actually happened so the note sorts and groups correctly in the date-organized Notes list.To do this automatically for everything dropped into a folder, use watch folders instead.
The audio for every meeting note is saved locally to Documents/Vowen Recordings in your home folder, on both macOS and Windows. This file is the source of truth for the note. Every transcript or summary regeneration starts from it.The saved file lets you:
Play back specific sections from the note’s audio player
Regenerate the transcript with a different model
Re-summarize with a different AI provider or template
You can delete the audio file at any time from your file manager. Once deleted, the note’s existing transcript and summary stay in place, but you can no longer regenerate either of them.
