Note apps that record your meetings: the questions before you install one

Meeting assistants that join calls, transcribe them and produce summaries are among the most genuinely useful tools of the last few years. They are also the ones most likely to create an obligation you did not know you had, because the content is other people talking.

1. Does everyone know?

This is a legal question in many places and an ethical one everywhere.

Recording law varies: some jurisdictions require only one party to consent, others require all of them, and the rule that applies may be the one where the other person is, not where you are. If your calls cross borders — which most do — the strictest applicable rule is the safe assumption.

Practically:

• Prefer a tool that announces itself. A visible bot participant, or a notice at the start, does the work for you.
• Say it out loud anyway. "I have notes running, is that alright?" takes three seconds and settles both the legal and the social question.
• Check what happens with external guests. Some tools notify internal participants and not external ones, which is exactly backwards.

2. Where does the audio go, and for how long?

Transcription is usually not local. The audio is uploaded, processed, and stored — and stored is the part that matters.

• Retention. How long is the audio kept after the transcript exists? Some tools keep the recording indefinitely by default; that is usually a setting.
• Who can see it. Team-wide by default is common. A transcript of a one-to-one visible to a whole workspace is a surprise nobody wants.
• Which subprocessors handle the audio, and where. The vendor's subprocessor list is the reliable source, not the marketing page.

3. Is the transcript used for training?

The answer differs between free and paid plans far more often here than in other categories, and this is the content where it matters most: meetings contain other people's words, salaries, client names, unreleased plans.

Look for whether training is opt-out rather than off, and check the answer for the plan you are actually on.

4. Can you get it out, and get rid of it?

• Export. Plain text, Markdown or a document format. A transcript locked in a proprietary viewer is a transcript you cannot use in a year.
• Deletion that includes the audio. Deleting a transcript does not always delete the recording behind it.
• Bulk deletion. Removing three years of meetings one at a time is the same as not being able to.

A meeting transcript is a record of other people's words. Every setting is a decision made on their behalf, which is a good reason to look at the defaults rather than accept them.

Where they earn their place

• Recall of detail — numbers, names, commitments — that nobody wrote down.
• Accessibility. A live transcript is a substantial improvement for participants who are deaf or hard of hearing, and for anyone working in a second language.
• Not having to take notes, which frees you to actually participate.

And where they cost more than they give

• One-to-ones and performance conversations, where the recording changes how people speak. That cost is invisible in the transcript and real in the room.
• Legal and HR discussions, where a record may be discoverable and creating one is a decision for someone else to make.
• Anything under a confidentiality agreement that names permitted processors, since the assistant is now one.

The rule that covers most of it: if you would hesitate to say "this is being recorded", that hesitation is the answer.