Answers

Questions, answered

The questions people actually ask about staying on top of meetings — answered straight, no fluff.

How do AI notetakers know who's speaking? Most of them don't work it out on their own — they separate the voices and get the names from somewhere else. Deciding who spoke is really two problems: separation, which is acoustic (grouping the audio into distinct voices), and identification, which is not (attaching a human name to each voice). Sound alone can establish that two different people spoke; nothing in the sound reveals that one of them is Priya. So every tool needs an outside source of names, and which one it has is decided by where it sits. Tools inside the meeting — a notetaker bot in the participant list, or the platform's own built-in AI — read the participant roster, and often get one clean audio stream per person, so they get both halves almost free. Tools that hear one mixed stream, including anything capturing your computer's system audio, a recorder on a table, or a phone, do the acoustic work themselves and have no roster to read. That is exactly what "Speaker 1" means: the separation worked and the naming had nothing to work from. The fix that works on every tool is the low-tech one — say people's names out loud during the call.
Do AI notetakers train on my meeting data? Usually not in the way people picture it — your meeting is very unlikely to end up in the weights of a general-purpose AI model — but that's the narrowest version of the question, and it's not the one worth asking. 'Training' bundles three different things: training a model on your words, using your content to 'improve the service' (a much broader phrase that can cover evaluation, tuning, and a human reviewing samples), and simply retaining your transcript to operate and debug the product. Most people are protected from the first and would object most to the second and third, which is exactly where policy language is vaguest. The bigger structural point: no notetaker runs its own speech and language models end to end, so the answer depends as much on the providers it calls as on the vendor itself — which is why a named subprocessor list is the single most informative thing on a privacy page. And the same vendor often answers differently depending on which door you came in, since consumer free tiers and business or API tiers are commonly governed by different terms. Check three things: the subprocessor list, the retention period, and whether an 'improve our AI' setting is on by default.
Does Fireflies show a summary during the meeting? No — Fireflies generates its summary, notes, and action items after the meeting ends, not during it. While the call is happening, the Fireflies bot sits in the participant list recording, and depending on your plan and setup you may be able to open a live transcript view — but a transcript is the full word-for-word text, not a condensed summary you can glance at. If what you want is a summary that updates while the meeting is still going, you need a real-time tool: Canary shows a live, multi-resolution rolling summary during the call, with no bot in the meeting.
Does Fathom show a summary during the meeting? No — Fathom's notetaker records the call while it's happening, and during the meeting you can click to highlight moments, but the summary itself is generated after the call ends. Fathom is known for delivering that recap unusually fast — often moments after you hang up — but fast-after is still after: while the meeting is live, there's nothing condensed to glance at when you've drifted and your name gets called. If you want a summary you can read during the call, a real-time tool like Canary shows a live, multi-resolution rolling summary that updates while people are still talking.
Can I get meeting notes without recording the call? Yes. An AI notetaker has to hear the call while it happens, but it doesn't have to keep a recording of it — notes and a recording are different artifacts. 'Recording' bundles two acts under one word: capturing the audio and keeping it. Every notetaker does the first; the second is a design choice, and the category splits it every way — most bot-based tools store a full audio or video recording alongside the transcript, the platforms ship recording and live transcription as two separate features, and a system-audio tool like Canary processes audio in short chunks, discards it, and stores only the text transcript and rolling summaries. So you can get real meeting notes while no replayable recording of the call exists anywhere. Two caveats keep the answer honest: consent and disclosure attach to the capture, not to the file format — 'we're only transcribing' is not a loophole, so tell people either way — and if a recording ban is what prompted the question, check whether the policy means 'no stored file' or 'no capture at all' before treating notes as allowed.
Can an AI notetaker hear my meeting if I wear headphones? Yes — headphones make no difference to any capture method the category actually uses, because none of them listen to your room. A notetaker bot (Otter, Fireflies, Fathom) sits inside the meeting itself as a participant; platform-native AI (Zoom AI Companion, Teams, Meet) runs inside the platform's own pipeline; a caption-scraping extension reads text the platform renders; and a system-audio tool like Canary reads the digital stream your operating system is sending to your output device before it ever becomes sound — speakers, a USB headset, AirPods, it's the same stream either way. Canary captures that stream (no bot in the call, no plugin) and shows a live, multi-resolution rolling summary while the call is going. The one method headphones genuinely break is a microphone in the room — a phone on the desk, Voice Memos, a hardware recorder — because with headphones on, the other side of the call never enters the room: you get a recording of your own voice and silence where the answers were. The folklore that 'headphones break recording' has a real root, but it's about legacy plumbing: Stereo Mix and hand-routed virtual audio cables really do fail when you switch to a headset. OS-level capture follows your output wherever it goes.
Can I use an AI notetaker for job interviews? Technically, yes — a job interview is an ordinary video call, so every capture method in the category works exactly as it does anywhere else. The mechanics are the easy part. What changes is everything around them. Consent isn't symmetric: a candidate who wants the job is in a poor position to object, so agreement given under that pressure isn't the same as agreement between colleagues, and the disclosure bar should be higher rather than lower. The output isn't personal notes either — it becomes part of a hiring record that other people read and act on, which is why a summary of what was said must never be turned into an assessment of the candidate. And the biggest practical cost is that typing notes during an interview takes your attention off the one person you're supposed to be evaluating. Canary is a real-time, bot-free meeting summarizer: it captures your computer's system audio (no bot in the call, no plugin) and shows a live, multi-resolution rolling summary — from what's being said right now to the whole call — so you can catch up the instant your name is called, and in an interview so you can ask the follow-up question that refers to something said twenty minutes ago. If you need scorecards attached to the candidate's record and governed retention, your applicant tracking system is the right tool, not a notetaker.
Can I get AI notes for an in-person meeting? Yes, but not from anything in the AI-notetaker category. Every tool in that category captures a meeting that exists as software — a notetaker bot needs a meeting link to join, the platform's own AI needs a platform, a caption-scraping extension needs captions, and system-audio capture needs something playing through your computer. A conversation in a room is none of those: it exists only as sound in the air, so the only thing that can capture it is a microphone in that room. In practice that means a dedicated recorder (Plaud, a Limitless pendant), a phone app, or a laptop's built-in mic as a weak fallback. Hybrid meetings are the different case, and the more common one: the moment anyone dials in, the meeting is back on a computer, and if you're the person dialing in, the room arrives as ordinary system audio — which is exactly what Canary reads. Canary shows a live, multi-resolution rolling summary during the call, with no bot and no plugin, on macOS, Windows, and Linux. For a room with no call attached, it's the wrong tool and a recorder is the right one.
Can I get AI notes for a webinar? Yes — but mostly not with the tools built for meetings. Notetaker bots (Otter, Fireflies, Fathom, Read AI, tl;dv) attend a call as a participant, and a webinar rarely gives attendees a seat a bot can take: entry usually sits behind a registration form, attendees are view-only, and the calendar 'link' often points at a landing page rather than a joinable call. The hosting platform's own AI belongs to the host, not to you — as an attendee you can't switch it on. What does work is capturing the audio your computer is playing, which is what Canary does: to system-audio capture a webinar is just sound, like any other call, so it shows a live, multi-resolution rolling summary while the webinar runs — on any webinar platform, and on recorded trainings and replays too, since playback is also system audio. It runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux. One honest limit: audio capture hears the narration, not the slides, so a number that only ever appears on screen isn't in your notes.
Do AI meeting notes work in other languages? Usually yes for transcription in widely spoken languages, and less reliably for everything that comes after. 'Supports 100+ languages' is almost always a claim about one stage of a four-stage pipeline — the speech-to-text step — and it describes the languages a tool will attempt, not the ones it handles equally well. Speaker attribution travels across languages fairly well, because it works from voice characteristics rather than words. Summarization is a separate model with its own, usually narrower, set of languages it is genuinely fluent in, and getting notes in a different language from the one spoken is a third thing again: translation, with its own error rate stacked on top of the transcript's. The case that breaks most tools is not a meeting in another language but a meeting in two, because pipelines generally expect one language per call and mid-call switching tends to produce confident, plausible-looking errors rather than obvious garbage. Canary is English-first, so if the meeting itself is conducted in another language a transcription-first tool such as Notta or Sembly is the better pick. Where a live summary earns its place is the other multilingual case nobody builds for: the English-language call you are attending in your second language.
Do AI meeting notes capture screen shares, video, and chat? Usually not in the notes themselves. Almost every AI meeting summary is written from the transcript, which means it is built from what people said, not from what was on screen — so the answer depends on what you mean by 'capture'. Tools that record video (a notetaker bot with recording on, or the platform's own cloud recording) do store the screen share, so you can rewatch it later; the written summary is still generated from the words. Meeting chat is a separate stream again: platform-native recaps often keep it, some third-party notetakers pull it in, and tools that only hear audio never see it. A tool that captures your computer's system audio, like Canary, gets the spoken layer only — no slides, no faces, no chat. That is a real limitation for demos and design reviews, where the screen is the content, and much less of one for the ordinary case, because the slide is usually still on your screen while the sentence you missed is already gone.
Who can see my AI meeting notes? Whoever controls the account the notes were captured on — which is usually not the same as who was in the meeting. That one fact answers most versions of this question. If the call was summarized by the platform's own AI (Zoom AI Companion, Teams recap, Google Meet notes, Webex), the record sits in the hosting organization's account, is commonly available to attendees and sometimes shared automatically, and is reachable by that organization's administrators under whatever retention policy already applies. If a colleague's notetaker bot was in the call, the transcript is in their vendor account: you generally can't see it, and you can't delete it either — only they can. If your company provisioned the tool for you, expect a workspace, an admin console, and access that outlives your employment. If you pay for the tool yourself and it runs on your own machine, the notes are yours, though the vendor's transcription and summarization pipeline still processes them. One thing no tool changes: your own private notes don't make the meeting private, because anyone else on the call may be capturing it too.
Can I get AI notes for a phone call? It depends entirely on where the call's audio is playing, and that splits the question in two. If the call runs through your computer — Microsoft Teams calling, Zoom Phone, a Slack or Discord call, WhatsApp on the desktop, a browser-based dialer in your CRM — then it is just audio your machine is playing, and a system-audio tool can transcribe and summarize it the same way it handles a video call. That is what Canary does, and it shows a live, multi-resolution rolling summary while the call is still going, on macOS, Windows, and Linux. If the call is on your actual handset, nothing running on your computer can hear it: you need built-in call recording where your device and region offer it, a dedicated recorder like Plaud, or a wearable like Limitless. What almost never works for either case is a notetaker bot — Otter, Fireflies, Fathom, Read AI, tl;dv and the rest join through a Zoom, Meet, Teams, or Webex meeting link, and a phone call has no link and no calendar event for them to find. Phone calls are also the strictest corner of recording law, so say it out loud in the first ten seconds either way.
Can an AI notetaker attend a meeting for me? Yes, two kinds can. A bot-based notetaker joins the call through the meeting link, so it attends whether or not you do — connect it to your calendar and tools like Otter, Fireflies, Read AI, tl;dv, or Circleback will send their bot to a meeting you skip and deliver a transcript, summary, and action items afterward. Platform-native AI (Zoom, Teams, Google Meet, Webex) can do the same from inside the platform, where the host's plan and admin settings allow it and someone turns it on. What can't attend for you is anything that runs on your own computer: caption extensions and bot-free system-audio tools — Canary included — capture the call your machine is playing, so if you're not on the call there's nothing to capture. Two caveats before you send one: what attends is a recorder, not a representative — it can't answer when your name comes up — and an unaccompanied bot is the first thing hosts eject, so tell the organizer first. And for the much larger set of meetings you can't fully skip — needed for ten minutes, not sixty — a proxy doesn't work at all; that's the case a live rolling summary is built for.
Is there a free AI meeting notetaker? Yes, several — but "free" means four different things in this category, and picking the wrong one wastes a month. (1) Already paid for: if your company has a paid Zoom, Teams, Google Workspace, or Webex plan, some AI meeting features are usually included at no extra cost — the cheapest option, but it only works on that platform, and on a call another company hosts you don't control whether it's on. (2) Free tiers of commercial notetakers: genuinely usable, and Fathom's is among the most generous, but they're metered — typically by meetings or minutes per month, with history and AI features capped before raw transcription is. (3) Free trials: not free, just deferred. (4) Open-source models like Whisper run on your own machine: free of charge and the only option where nothing leaves your computer, but it costs setup time and a decent machine, and what you get is a transcript, not a summary. Canary's free tier is 5 meetings a month with the full live, bot-free rolling summary on macOS, Windows, and Linux; Pro is $15/month for unlimited. The honest rule: no notetaker is costless — you pay in metered meetings, in your meeting data, or in your own time.
Can I get a live summary during a Webex meeting? Almost — Webex comes closer than any other major platform, but for a truly live summary the answer is still no. What Webex keeps on screen continuously is captions and a running transcript: raw text, not a summary. Its AI Assistant's "Catch Me Up" can summarize what you missed while the meeting is still running — the best native in-meeting catch-up any platform ships — but it's a one-shot recap you have to request, and it only exists when the host's paid plan and their organization's admin settings allow it, which your own subscription can't change on a call another company hosts. A real-time summarizer like Canary takes a different route: it captures your computer's system audio — no bot in the participant list, no plugin, nothing for a host or admin to enable — and keeps a live, multi-resolution rolling summary on screen, from what's being said right now to the whole call, in any Webex meeting, on macOS, Windows, and Linux.
Does Granola show a summary during the meeting? No — Granola captures your meeting's audio while the call is happening, but its AI-enhanced notes are generated after the meeting ends, not during it. While the call is live, what you have is your own notepad and the raw transcript Granola is building in the background; the polished summary arrives once you stop. If what you want is a continuously updating summary you can glance at mid-meeting, a real-time tool like Canary fills that gap with a live, multi-resolution rolling summary that updates while people are still talking.
Can I get a live summary during a Google Meet call? Yes — but not continuously from Google Meet itself. What Meet puts on screen live is a transcript: captions, which are free and available on nearly every account. Google's summaries come from Gemini in Meet ("Take notes for me"), which delivers a notes document afterward and, where it's available, can give someone who joined late a summary of the discussion so far — the closest native catch-up in the category, but one you have to ask for, on a paid Workspace plan with Gemini, started from the meeting organizer's side. A real-time summarizer like Canary takes a different route: it captures your computer's system audio locally — no bot in the participant list, no plugin, nothing the host has to enable — and keeps a live, multi-resolution rolling summary on screen, from what's being said right now to the whole call, in any Meet call including ones another company hosts, on macOS, Windows, and Linux.
Can I get a live summary during a Teams call? Yes — but not from Teams itself. What Microsoft Teams shows live is a transcript: captions and a word-for-word record, when transcription is available and turned on. Its actual summaries arrive two other ways, both gated — intelligent recap after the meeting ends, behind Teams Premium or a Copilot license, and Copilot's mid-meeting answers, which need a Copilot license, admin enablement, transcription running, and a typed prompt every time you want to catch up. A real-time summarizer like Canary takes a different route: it captures your computer's system audio locally — no bot in the participant list, no plugin, nothing the host has to enable — and shows a live, multi-resolution rolling summary, from what's being said right now to the whole call, in any Teams meeting, including ones another company hosts, on macOS, Windows, and Linux.
Can I get AI notes for a Slack huddle? Yes, but almost none of the usual tools work. Notetaker bots — Otter, Fireflies, Fathom, Read AI, tl;dv, Circleback — join meetings as a guest through a Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, or Webex link, and Slack doesn't hand out huddle audio that way, so there is no bot to invite. Huddles also break the other half of how those tools operate: they usually start because someone clicked the headphones icon in a channel, with no calendar event for a bot to watch. That leaves two things that actually work. Slack's own AI can produce huddle notes and a transcript in the huddle thread where Slack AI is available on your plan and enabled by your admin. Or you capture your computer's system audio, which is what Canary does — it reads the sound your machine is already playing, so a huddle is just audio like any other call, and it shows a live, multi-resolution rolling summary while the huddle is still going, on macOS, Windows, and Linux.
How do I record system audio on Windows without a virtual audio device? To record your PC's system audio without a virtual audio device, use a tool that opens a WASAPI loopback stream — a mode built into Windows that reads the audio your PC is already sending to your speakers, with nothing installed and nothing rerouted. Virtual cables like VB-Cable and Voicemeeter still work, but they install a driver, take over your output, and have to be re-routed by hand; the legacy "Stereo Mix" device is driver-dependent and missing on most modern machines. Canary uses WASAPI loopback for meetings: it captures the call audio on-device — no virtual device, no bot, no plugin — and turns it into a live, rolling summary you can read during the call.
How accurate are AI meeting notes? Accurate enough to rely on for recall, not accurate enough to quote from without checking. There are really two accuracies and they fail differently. Transcription — turning speech into words — is strong on clear audio and degrades predictably with crosstalk, poor microphones, heavy accents, and unfamiliar jargon or proper nouns. Summarization — turning those words into notes — fails less predictably, because a fluent summary can drop a decision, compress away a caveat, attach an action item to the wrong person, or state something with more confidence than anyone in the room actually had. Speaker labels are the weakest link in most tools. The working rule: trust AI meeting notes for what was discussed and roughly who owns what, and verify anything you would quote, commit to, or forward. Notes that appear during the call, like Canary's live rolling summary, are easier to verify for one reason only — the meeting is still happening, so a wrong line can be corrected while it still costs nothing.
Can I use an AI notetaker if I'm not the meeting host? Yes, but which tools work changes completely — because the host controls the meeting platform and you don't. The platform's own AI (Zoom AI Companion, Teams Copilot recap, Google Meet's note-taking) is normally the host's or their admin's to switch on, and in a call hosted by another company you often can't reach the setting at all. Recording is gated the same way. A notetaker bot has to be admitted through the waiting room or lobby, so the host can simply refuse it — and many now do. What is not host-gated is software running on your own computer: a tool that captures your machine's system audio, like Canary, behaves identically whether you host the call or were invited to it, and shows a live rolling summary while the meeting is still going. Being technically able isn't the same as being allowed, though — say you're taking AI notes, and if the host has declined recording, that answer stands.
How do I stop AI notetakers from joining my meetings? Notetaker bots get in the same way any uninvited guest does — they sign into your meeting link as a participant — so the controls that gate guests are the controls that stop them. Turn on the waiting room or lobby so nothing joins without approval (Zoom's Waiting Room, Teams' lobby set to 'People in my organization', Google Meet's host management with Quick Access off), remove any bot already in the call from the participant list, and lock the meeting once everyone has arrived. That handles the symptom. The cause is almost always one attendee whose notetaker is set to auto-join every event on their calendar, so the durable fix is to ask that person to turn auto-join off, or to agree as a team on a single notetaker and one person who runs it. If what you object to is specifically the extra participant and the second copy of the conversation rather than note-taking itself, bot-free notetakers capture your own computer's audio instead and never appear in the participant list at all.
Is there an AI meeting notetaker for Linux? Yes, but the honest answer depends on which kind of tool you mean. Bot-based notetakers (Otter, Fireflies, Fathom, Read AI) already work from Linux, because the bot runs on the vendor's servers and joins the call itself — your operating system is irrelevant, and so is your audio stack. Caption-scraping browser extensions like Tactiq also run on Linux, since Chrome does. The gap is desktop, bot-free notetakers: the well-known ones — Granola, Jamie, Krisp — publish macOS and Windows builds only. Canary is the exception: it runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux, capturing your computer's system audio through a PulseAudio/PipeWire monitor source and showing a live, multi-resolution rolling summary during the call, with no bot in the meeting.
Can I use an AI notetaker if my company blocks meeting bots? Usually yes — because what your company blocked is almost certainly the bot, not note-taking. Bot bans are enforced inside the meeting platform: admins disable third-party marketplace apps, restrict who can join as a guest, or refuse calendar access to notetaker vendors. A tool that captures your own computer's system audio never touches any of that — nothing joins the call and nothing is added to your Zoom, Teams, or Meet account. Canary works this way, showing a live rolling summary during the call with no bot in the participant list. That said, 'not blocked' isn't 'approved': your device-software policy and your recording/confidentiality policy still apply, so check with IT and tell participants you're capturing notes.
How do AI meeting notetakers work? Every AI meeting notetaker runs the same four-stage pipeline: capture the audio, transcribe it to text with speech recognition, label who said what (speaker diarization), then feed the transcript to a language model that writes the summary and pulls out action items. The real differences between tools are in stage one and stage four. Stage one is how the audio is captured — a bot that joins the call as a participant, a platform's built-in recording, a browser extension reading live captions, or direct capture of your computer's own system audio. Stage four is when the summary is written — after the meeting ends for most tools, or continuously during the call for real-time summarizers like Canary.
Why did a bot join my meeting? A bot that joins your call — usually labeled something like 'Otter.ai', 'Fireflies Notetaker', 'Read.ai', or 'Fathom' — is an AI notetaker that one of the participants connected to their calendar. It auto-joined to record and transcribe the meeting so it can generate a summary and action items afterward. It isn't a Zoom feature, a hacker, or a stranger: it's a third-party assistant an attendee is using. You can ask whose it is, and anyone can decline it or ask it to leave. Bot-free tools like Canary do the same job by reading your computer's own audio locally, so nothing extra shows up in the participant list.
Are AI meeting notetakers safe? Yes — most AI meeting notetakers are safe to use, but how safe depends on three things you can check. First, whether a bot joins your call: a recording bot is a separate account in the meeting that can see and store the whole conversation. Second, what happens to your audio: the safest tools discard it right after transcription instead of keeping a recording. Third, who processes and stores your transcript, and whether your data trains anyone's models. Look for a tool that captures only when you start it (not always-on), doesn't persist raw audio, encrypts notes at rest, names its subprocessors, and lets you delete your data. Canary is built this way: no bot joins the call, raw audio is never written to disk, summaries are encrypted at rest, and capture runs only when you press Start.
How do I tell participants I'm using an AI notetaker? Tell participants before the meeting starts, and keep it to one plain sentence — 'Heads up, I'm using an AI tool to take notes.' Say it out loud at the top of the call, or add a line to the calendar invite so no one is surprised. This matters even with a bot-free tool like Canary that captures your computer's system audio with no bot in the call: because nothing announces itself, the disclosure is on you. A short, upfront heads-up keeps you on the right side of both meeting etiquette and recording-consent rules, which vary by region.
What's the difference between a live transcript and a live summary? A live transcript is a word-for-word stream of everything being said, updating as people speak — accurate, but a lot to read. A live summary distills that same conversation into the meaning that matters, updating every few seconds so you can grasp the situation at a glance instead of reading a wall of text. Both happen during the meeting; the difference is words vs. meaning. Tools like Tactiq show a live transcript, while Canary shows a live, multi-resolution summary.
Can I get meeting notes without a Zoom plugin? Yes. You don't need a Zoom plugin, marketplace app, or meeting bot to get notes from a Zoom call. Tools that capture your computer's system audio work entirely outside Zoom — there's nothing to add to your Zoom account, no app to approve, and no bot that joins as a participant. Canary takes this approach: it listens to your system audio locally and shows a live, multi-resolution rolling summary during the call, so you get notes without ever touching Zoom's plugin marketplace.
How do I record system audio on a Mac without a virtual audio device? To record your Mac's system audio without a virtual audio device, use a tool that taps macOS's built-in system-audio capture instead of routing sound through BlackHole, Soundflower, or Loopback. Canary does this for meetings: it reads the audio your Mac is already playing on-device — no virtual device, no bot, no plugin — and turns it into a live, rolling summary. The older virtual-device method still works, but it adds setup, can take over your speaker output, and tends to break on macOS updates.
Is it legal to record a meeting? In most places it is legal to record a meeting you're part of, but the consent rule varies by region: some jurisdictions need only one participant's consent (you), while others require everyone on the call to agree. About a dozen U.S. states — including California, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Washington — are 'all-party' consent states, and the EU's GDPR treats meeting audio as personal data, so disclosure is expected. The safe, simple rule everywhere is to tell participants before you capture anything. This is general information, not legal advice.
What's the best meeting notes app for ADHD? For ADHD, the best meeting notes app is one that shows a live, glanceable summary during the call rather than only a recap afterward — so when your attention drifts and you lose the thread, you can glance over and instantly reorient. Canary is built this way: it keeps a real-time, multi-resolution summary (now, last 2 minutes, last 5 minutes, full call) that offloads the working-memory load of holding the whole conversation in your head. Most notetakers only summarize after the meeting, which doesn't help in the moment a thread slips.
Can I get a live summary during a Zoom call? Yes — you can get a live summary during a Zoom call by using a real-time meeting summarizer like Canary, which captures the call's system audio locally and shows a continuously updating summary while the meeting is happening. This is different from most AI notetakers, which only produce a summary after the call ends. Because Canary doesn't join as a bot, it works the same on Zoom, Google Meet, or Teams.
Does Otter show a summary during the meeting? No — Otter shows a live transcript while a meeting is happening, but its actual summary is generated after the call ends, not during it. So if what you want is a continuously updating summary you can glance at mid-meeting, Otter's live view gives you a running transcript rather than a condensed summary. A real-time summarizer like Canary fills that gap by showing a live, multi-resolution rolling summary while the meeting is still going.
How do I catch up after stepping away from a call? To catch up after stepping away from a call, use a real-time meeting summarizer like Canary that has been keeping a live, rolling summary of the conversation. When you return, read its 'last few minutes' view to see what happened while you were gone — in a couple of seconds and without asking anyone to repeat themselves. Tools that only summarize after the meeting can't help here, because their summary doesn't exist until the call is over.
How do I take meeting notes without a bot joining the call? To take AI meeting notes without a bot, use a tool like Canary that captures your computer's system audio locally instead of joining the meeting as a participant. Because it listens to the audio your computer is already playing, nothing shows up in the participant list, there's no plugin or virtual audio device to install, and it works the same on Zoom, Google Meet, or Teams. Bot-based notetakers, by contrast, dial into the call and appear to everyone.
Real-time vs after-the-meeting AI notes — which do I need? Choose real-time AI notes if your problem is staying on top of the conversation while it's happening — being able to answer when you're called on or catch up after stepping away. Choose after-the-meeting AI notes if your problem is remembering decisions and sharing recaps afterward. They solve different problems, and only real-time notes (like Canary's live rolling summary) can help you while you're still in the meeting. Many people benefit from both.
What did I miss in the meeting? To find out what you missed without asking people to repeat themselves, use a real-time meeting summarizer like Canary that keeps a live, rolling summary of the call. When your name is called, glance at the 'last 2 minutes' view to see what was just discussed, then respond. Tools that only summarize after the meeting can't help you in the moment.