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AI provider required. Summaries are generated by your configured AI provider. Set one up under Configure your AI.
A meeting note on the Summary tab showing Key discussion points, Decisions, Action items and Follow-ups, with Regenerate Transcript and Regenerate Summary in the sidebar

A finished summary: the sections your template asked for, with the note's other views a tab away.

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How summaries work

After a meeting recording is transcribed, Vowen sends the transcript to your AI provider and asks for a structured summary. With the default Meeting Notes template, that includes key discussion points, decisions made, action items with owners (when speakers are identified) and follow-ups. Alongside the transcript, Vowen also sends:
  • Anything you typed on the Notes tab during the meeting, as user-supplied context
  • Every moment you marked as important, with an instruction to give those points extra weight
  • Any screenshots you captured, as vision context
The shape of the output comes entirely from the template. A stand-up does not need the same structure as a customer discovery call, so pick the right template before you record.
Vowen titles each note for you. Do not write TITLE: in your own template prompt. Doing so produces a duplicated header in the finished summary. The in-app hint in the template editor still asks for it. Ignore that hint, it is out of date.

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Custom templates

Templates control the structure of every summary. Vowen ships a large built-in library covering meeting recaps, action items, executive briefs, stand-ups, retrospectives, sales calls, user interviews, one-on-ones, lecture notes and more, and on Pro you can write your own. Templates also carry settings beyond the prompt, including whether to capture system audio, which tags to apply, the summary language, and whether to generate an AI summary at all.

Templates

The full library, writing your own prompts, and every per-template setting.

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Summary citations

Summary citations are a Pro feature. It is opt-in and off by default.
Turn on Summary citations on the Recording Defaults tab of Notes settings to have the AI cite the transcript inline as it writes. Each citation renders as a small timestamp pill in the summary. Clicking one switches to the Transcript tab, scrolls to the cited segment, briefly highlights it, and cues the audio player to that moment. It does not start playback, so you decide whether to listen. Citations survive editing the transcript. If you later reword or restructure it so far that a citation no longer matches anything, clicking it tells you the passage could not be found rather than jumping somewhere wrong. Citations need the transcript to be small enough for the summary model to hold alongside the summary it is writing, so a very long meeting may come back without them. When that happens the summary is generated normally, just without the pills. At most one citation appears per line.
A template can opt out of citations independently of the global setting. The shipped Follow-Up Email Draft template does, because timestamp pills would ruin a send-ready email.
When you export a note, citations can be stripped entirely or converted to plain [12:04] timestamps.

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Claude Code and Codex as summary providers

As well as the usual API-key providers, Vowen can use Claude Code or Codex as the summary provider. Unlike every other option, these are detected on your machine rather than connected with an API key. If the CLI is installed and runs, Vowen offers it in the provider list. There is no key to paste, because you are already signed in to the CLI itself. If one you have just installed does not show up, give it a moment and check that it runs from your terminal. Both agents run with their own tools turned off, so they only ever see the summary Vowen asks them to write, and cannot touch anything else on your machine.
Screenshots are dropped when the summary provider is a CLI agent. These agents only receive text. If you rely on screenshot context, use an API-key provider for that note.

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Regenerating a summary

If a summary is not quite right, regenerate it from the right sidebar of the note:
1

Open the note

Click it in the Notes list.
2

Open the Regenerate Summary section

It is in the right sidebar. If the note has no summary yet, the section reads Generate Summary instead.
3

Pick a provider, model or template

The section holds an AI provider grid and a template grid.
4

Click Regenerate Summary

The current summary is replaced by the new one.
Regenerate when you want a more capable model, when you want a different structure, or when the first attempt came out off-target. You can also regenerate the transcript from the sidebar’s Regenerate Transcript section, picking a different transcription model and adjusting Identify Speakers and the speaker count. That re-transcribes the saved audio file, so it only works while the audio still exists.
If a summary feels cut short or off-target, try regenerating with a more capable model before re-recording the meeting.

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When a summary fails

Vowen retries a failed summary automatically before giving up.
  • The automatic pass after a recording makes 3 attempts, waiting 2 seconds after the first failure and 4 seconds after the second (a linear backoff).
  • Regenerating a summary by hand makes 2 attempts, with a single 2-second wait.
Vowen fails fast and does not retry at all when the error is permanent:
  • HTTP status 400, 401, 403, 404, 413 or 422
  • An unsupported or unconfigured AI provider
  • CLI agent problems, such as the binary not being found on the machine, the CLI not being signed in, or it failing to start
Everything else is retried, including rate limits, server errors and overload responses. When every attempt fails, the reason is saved on the note and shown in the UI. The note reads “Summary failed to generate. You can retry below.” with the underlying error behind a “What went wrong?” disclosure, and the note opens on the Transcript tab so your transcript is still front and center. The audio recording is always preserved in Documents/Vowen Recordings, so nothing is lost. For transcription failures rather than summary failures, switch to a more accurate model such as Deepgram Nova 3 or AssemblyAI Universal-3.5 Pro and regenerate the transcript.

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Working with a note

Open a meeting note from the Notes list to review, edit and reprocess it.

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Tabs

A note has up to four tabs: The My Notes tab only appears when the note has context notes on it, or while you are already on it.
The tab shortcuts are keyed to the physical key positions, including the numeric keypad, so they work on layouts such as AZERTY where the unshifted number row does not produce digits. Cmd+3 always goes to Ask AI, even when My Notes is showing in third position. My Notes has no shortcut of its own.

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The My Notes tab and its Regenerate button

This tab holds whatever you jotted on the indicator or panel during the meeting. It stays editable afterwards. The Regenerate summary from notes button re-runs the whole summary with your edited notes as framing context, then drops you back on the Summary tab. It saves any pending edits to your notes first, so you never regenerate against a stale version. It needs a transcript to work.

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Editing the summary

The summary is a rich block editor. Click into it and type, and edits save automatically.
  • Type / anywhere to open the block menu: Text, Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3, Bulleted list, Numbered list, To-do list, Quote, Code block, Divider and Image. The menu filters as you type and is keyboard-drivable with the arrows, Enter and Tab.
  • Insert an image by URL, or by picking, dragging or pasting a local file. Local images are copied into Vowen’s own storage so they stay with the note even if you move or delete the original.

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Find and replace

Both the summary and the transcript support find and replace, using the same bar.
  • Cmd+F / Ctrl+F opens find
  • Cmd+Shift+F / Ctrl+Shift+F opens it with the replace row already showing
  • Replace (or Enter) replaces the current match. The All button (or Shift+Enter) replaces every match.
Replace All is a single undo step. However many matches it changes, one Cmd+Z puts them all back.

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Editing the transcript

Each transcript line has a Segment actions menu with:
  • Reassign this line to, listing the other speakers plus a New speaker option
  • Split at caret, which breaks the segment at your cursor position. Place the caret inside the text first.
  • Merge with line above, disabled on the first line
  • Delete segment
These are structural edits to the transcript, and each is a single undo step.

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Speaker names

If you recorded with diarization on, the right sidebar lists the speakers as Speaker 1, Speaker 2 and so on. Type a real name over any of them. Vowen suggests names as you type, drawn from every speaker name you have ever entered across your notes and transcriptions. Names are not saved as you type. Click Save Changes in the sidebar to persist them. The button reads Saved and is disabled once there is nothing pending. See diarization for merging two labels that turned out to be the same person.

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The audio player

The note’s audio player has:
  • Playback speed in seven steps: 0.5x, 0.75x, 1x, 1.25x, 1.5x, 1.75x and 2x. Press < and > to step through them. Pitch is preserved, so voices do not distort. Your chosen speed is remembered across notes.
  • Skip controls that jump backward and forward by 10 seconds
Clicking a transcript segment or a citation pill cues the player to that moment.

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Exporting

Exporting is a Pro feature.
Click Export on a note to save it outside Vowen. The dialog offers a live preview and lets you choose:
  • Summary or Transcript as PDF, plain text (.txt) or Markdown (.md), with an optional title and date header
  • Transcript as subtitles, SubRip (.srt) or WebVTT (.vtt), one cue per spoken segment with speaker names where available. Only offered when the transcript has per-segment timing.
  • Audio as MP3, M4A (AAC) or WAV, with a quality option. An estimated file size is shown first.
To export several notes at once, select them on the Notes page and use Export in the bulk action bar. To publish a note as a link instead of a file, see sharing.

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Where notes are stored

Meeting notes are stored locally, in Vowen’s own folder:
  • macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Vowen/
  • Windows: %APPDATA%\Vowen\
Each note keeps:
  • Its title, and whether you edited it by hand
  • The date and time it was recorded, and the day it is grouped under
  • The full transcript, with per-segment timings
  • The AI summary, or the error that stopped one being generated
  • A reference to the audio file
  • The names you assigned to diarized speakers
  • The text from the My Notes tab
  • The screenshots captured during the meeting
  • The moments you marked as important, each with an excerpt when live transcription was running
  • The tags applied to the note
  • Its public share link, and whether you have revoked it
Ask AI conversations are not stored on the note. They are kept separately, alongside it. Deleting a note deletes its conversations with it.
Only the most recent 100 meeting notes are kept, on every plan. See plans and limits.