How Notetaker works
What Epilude captures during a meeting, where transcription runs, and where your transcripts, summaries, and recordings are stored.
Notetaker records a meeting on your Mac and turns it into a transcript, a summary, and action items. No bot joins the call: Epilude captures the audio on your side.
What Epilude captures
Epilude records two audio streams: your microphone, and the meeting audio your Mac plays (the other participants in a call). The transcript separates the two, labeling your side Me and the other side Them. All remote participants appear together as Them.
The transcript builds live while the meeting runs, so you can glance at it at any time. Because the microphone is one of the streams, Notetaker also works for in-person conversations: put your Mac on the table and record.
What happens when you stop
Stopping a recording finishes the transcript, and Epilude starts writing the notes straight away. Epilude classifies the kind of meeting automatically (a standup, a 1:1, an interview, a sales call, and other common types) and produces an overview, key topics, decisions, open questions, and action items. Points in the summary reference the transcript moments they came from.
A meeting with too little speech to write from is the exception. Nothing is written, and the meeting offers Resume so you can record more. Stopping again writes the notes.
If you move on to something else while notes are generating, a floating card announces "Your summary is ready", and View summary opens the meeting. See Summaries and action items for what the summary contains and how to edit it.
Where meetings are processed
By default, Notetaker transcribes in Epilude's cloud through your Epilude account. The audio is processed for transcription and not stored on Epilude's servers, and an internet connection is required while recording.
On Apple Silicon Macs, switch Notetaker to Local mode in Settings → Models to transcribe meetings on your Mac. This choice is independent from Dictation and Narrator. The audio never leaves your Mac, and recording works offline once the on-device model is installed.
Summaries and action items are written by Epilude's cloud model by default. Creating them sends the transcript text, not the audio, to Epilude. On a 16GB+ Apple Silicon Mac you can instead have EP-1 write them on your Mac: pick Local on the Meeting summary model card in Settings → Models. It is the private option, not the strongest one: about 6 in 10 notes come out ready to send, against about 9 in 10 with the cloud model, and a 45 to 60 minute meeting takes about 20 minutes to write up with your Mac's processor fully busy. Every note says which model wrote it, just under the notes.
Local Mode and meetings
Recordings started in Notetaker's Local mode always use on-device transcription, and the audio never leaves your Mac. The notes are a separate choice. With the cloud model (the default), stopping a recording sends the finished transcript text to Epilude's cloud to be written up; the recording itself is never sent. With on-device notes chosen, nothing leaves your Mac: not the audio, not the transcript. If the on-device model cannot write a note, the note fails with the transcript intact rather than quietly using the cloud.
What language your notes use
Transcripts and summaries follow the Main language picker in Settings → General → Language. There is no per-meeting language detection, so set the language before recording a meeting held in another one.
Where your notes live
Everything you keep is stored on your Mac. Meetings live in a searchable library inside Epilude, and each meeting also saves as a Markdown file in ~/Documents/Epilude Notes or a folder you choose. See Export and auto-save.
Audio recordings are saved only if you turn on Save audio recordings in Settings → Notetaker. The toggle is off by default, so Epilude keeps the notes, not the audio. Deleting a meeting removes it, and any saved audio, from your Mac.
What you need
- Microphone permission, to record your side of the meeting
- Screen Recording permission, to capture the meeting audio your Mac plays
- Accessibility permission, so Epilude can notice when a meeting app starts
- An internet connection while recording with cloud transcription. Local transcription works offline.
- An Epilude subscription for cloud transcription and cloud summaries. On the Pay Once plan, meetings record with Local transcription and you keep the full transcript; cloud summaries need a subscription, and on-device notes do not.
Grant the permissions in System Settings → Privacy & Security.