Meeting notes: transcripts of your calls
On this page
When a call starts in Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Slack or FaceTime, Short Leash asks Take notes on this Zoom call? Choose Take notes and Short Leash transcribes you and the others as you talk. The speech model runs on your computer: no audio is saved, and nothing is sent anywhere.
Meeting notes are part of Short Leash Pro.
You're responsible for letting everyone on the call know you're taking notes. In some places, recording a call needs everyone's consent. Short Leash never takes notes on its own: every recording starts with you choosing Take notes, and a banner shows the whole time.
Turn it on
Meeting notes are off until you turn them on. While they're off, Short Leash doesn't look at which apps use your microphone at all.
Settings › Meeting notes › Turn on meeting notes walks through it:
- About notes, and that letting people know is up to you.
- A sound test. Short Leash plays a short chime and listens for it, so you don't need to be on a call. On a Mac, the first test asks you to allow System Audio Recording for Short Leash; if Short Leash hears nothing, allow it in System Settings › Privacy & Security › Screen & System Audio Recording, under System Audio Recording Only. On Windows no permission is needed.
- Apps to watch and how long to keep notes. If your disk isn't encrypted (FileVault, or device encryption or BitLocker on Windows), Short Leash says so: transcripts are saved on it.
Meeting notes use the same speech model as dictation. If it isn't downloaded yet, Settings › Models has it.
During a call
About 2 seconds after one of the apps you chose starts using your microphone (in a call's lobby, before anyone joins), Short Leash asks, in a small card near the top right of the screen (above the taskbar on Windows) that never takes the keyboard from your call. The same question comes as a notification with Take notes (a notification left from an earlier call starts nothing), and is in the menu bar (the tray on Windows), where you can answer it from the keyboard or with a screen reader. Short Leash never asks while you're dictating.
- Take notes shows a banner with an amber lamp, Taking notes and the time, and Stop notes. The menu bar icon changes while notes run.
- Not this time puts the question away until your next call.
- If you don't answer within a minute, the question stays at the top of the menu bar with Take notes. Nothing is recorded.
Notes stop when you choose Stop notes or when the call ends, and Notes ready says how long the call was, with Open notes. You can also start notes from the menu bar's Take notes for a call Short Leash didn't notice, and from Take notes in Pair's call bar.
A call in a browser (Google Meet, or any call on a website) is named after the browser, "call in Chrome", since Short Leash can't tell which site is calling.
After the call
When notes stop, Short Leash writes the summary on your computer with the model chosen for summaries and chat in Settings › Models: what the call was about, what was decided, what's still open, and the action items with who will do them and when in the call they came up. A long call is summarized a part at a time; if Short Leash quits partway, it picks up where it stopped. A call Short Leash named itself ("Zoom call") gets the title the summary gives it. If the model runs out of room for its answer, the summary ends with a note that it was cut short. To write it again, choose a model with a longer context in Settings › Models, then run leash meetings summarize <id>.
Work › Meetings lists your calls by day, and searches their titles, summaries and transcripts. A meeting's page has:
- Rename beside the title: type a new one and press Return (Enter on Windows); Esc keeps the old one. Meetings start named after their app, like "Zoom call".
- The summary, marked "Written by Qwen3.5 9B on this computer. Check it before you share it." While it's being written it says how far along it is, with Cancel; a summary that was canceled, or waits for a model to be downloaded, has Summarize.
- Action items, each with the time it came up: click it to see that moment in the transcript.
- The transcript, You and Them, folded until you open it, with the day it will be deleted and Keep transcript.
- Ask about this meeting opens a new chat with the meeting attached (its title shows on the message box; close it to ask about something else). When you send your question, Short Leash reads the meeting's summary, action items and transcript into the chat (the Read meeting notes row) before the model answers, so any model can use it. Chats that read a meeting are marked Has outside text: it's what people said.
- Export as Markdown saves the summary, action items and transcript, with front matter saying it was written by a model (
ai_generated: true,model,generator). - Delete meeting, with Undo for a few seconds.
From the terminal, leash meetings list, show, export and summarize do the same. Coding assistants can read meeting notes through the meeting_notes tool only after you turn on Let coding assistants read meeting notes in Settings › Coding assistants (MCP); Short Leash's own chat can always read them.
What's kept
- You and Them. Your microphone is You and the call's sound is Them. Short Leash tells them apart by where the sound came from; it never makes voiceprints. Without headphones, your microphone hears the others too; Short Leash leaves those repeats out of the transcript.
- Text only. Audio stays in memory in pieces of a few seconds until it's transcribed, and is never written to disk.
- For as long as you choose. Transcripts are kept 30 days and summaries a year unless you change it in Settings › Meeting notes, where both can be kept Forever. When a transcript is deleted, its summary stays; a summary stays at least as long as its transcript.
- Delete all meeting data in Settings › Meeting notes deletes every transcript and summary.
Notes are kept in Short Leash's database, readable only by your user. Nothing is used for training or sent anywhere.
What Short Leash hears
| Your side | The others | |
|---|---|---|
| macOS 14.4 and later | The microphone | The call app's sound (System Audio Recording) |
| Earlier macOS | The microphone | Not heard: notes have your side only |
| Windows 10 version 2004 and later | The microphone | The call app's sound |
The call app's sound is that app and its helper processes, so music or another app's alerts stay out of your notes. A call in a browser takes that browser's sound, every tab of it. A few cases take the sound of every app but Short Leash instead: a call in Safari on a Mac (Safari plays through a part of macOS every app shares), a Teams call on Windows, notes you start yourself from the menu bar, and older Windows. If the call app's sound stays silent for 30 seconds while the app is playing, or the app quits, Short Leash switches to every app's sound for the rest of the call.
When Short Leash can't hear the others, the menu bar says so while notes run.
If it doesn't work
- Short Leash doesn't ask when a call starts: check the app is on in Settings › Meeting notes › Apps to watch, and that Short Leash was running (Settings › Startup opens it at login). On macOS 13, which can't say which app uses the microphone, Short Leash asks about the call app in front while a microphone is in use; notes there stop with Stop notes or when that app quits, since Short Leash's own listening keeps the microphone busy.
- Notes have your side only: run the sound test again in Turn on meeting notes, and on a Mac allow System Audio Recording for Short Leash.
- "The speech model isn't downloaded yet": download it in Settings › Models.
To remove the permissions macOS gave Short Leash, run tccutil reset All dev.shortleash.app in Terminal.