02 / Meetings
Routines notices the call, records it on one click, transcribes it live — and answers your questions before the meeting even ends. See how it sits next to the rest of the field in our roundup of the best AI note takers.
Step 01
Weekly Product Sync
Google Meet
Step 02
Weekly Product Sync
Step 03
Step 04
Notes posted to #product
Summary · decisions · 3 action items
Recorded locally · live transcript · chat with your meeting
The real app
Real screens, captured straight from Routines on a Mac. Every transcript, summary, and note below lives in local storage on your machine.
Live, mid-meeting
The transcript streams in as people talk. Pop open the chat, ask "what did I miss?", and get a straight answer in seconds, without leaving the call or pausing the recording.
Live transcript · ask anything · still recording
Drop in a screenshot
Someone shares a dashboard or a slide in the call? Paste or drop the image straight into the meeting chat. Routines reads it alongside the transcript and answers in context.
Paste or drop an image · the AI reads it · answers in context
After you hang up
Stopping the recording hands the app straight back to you, and the one-pager lands on the meeting once it is written: summary, the decisions, who owns what. The full transcript sits one tab away, and you can keep chatting with the meeting or save it into your notes. It is stored as files on your Mac, not in an account you have to keep paying for.
AI summary · action items · saved as local markdown
After about an hour of recorded audio, Routines checks in with two buttons: keep recording or stop. It waits for a quiet moment in the call rather than cutting in mid-sentence, and if nobody answers, it stops the recording about ten minutes later and writes the notes as usual. Past three hours of recorded audio it asks no matter how lively the call is, and every Keep, before or past that mark, buys about another half hour before the next check-in.
Not happy with the summary? Ask Routines to regenerate the notes on any finished meeting and it writes a fresh one-pager from the stored transcript. If the rewrite fails, your old notes stay untouched. Only the summary step is re-run: the audio behind the transcript is deleted once the meeting is written up, so a word the transcription got wrong stays wrong in the new notes too.
Stop is instant
Stopping ends the recording and gives you the app back on the spot. The meeting joins a queue that runs in the background and writes the summary while you get on with the day.
01
The recorder is free the moment you stop, so a back to back meeting starts recording while the last one is still being written up. Summaries are written one meeting at a time, so the second one waits behind the first.
02
Until the summary is done, the meeting carries a "Generating notes…" line in your meeting lists on the homescreen and in the menu bar. That status sits on the meeting itself, so you can walk off to another screen and come back to it.
03
The recorded audio stays on disk until the meeting is finished being written up. Quit or crash in the middle and Routines picks the meeting back up on the next launch, running the write-up again from the start. If the write-up itself dies, the meeting is flagged so you can run it again.
Instant stop · background queue · resumes after a quit
01
Routines watches your calendar and your screen — when a Meet, Zoom, Teams, or Slack huddle starts, it offers to record. One click and the transcript begins.
02
Your mic and the room are captured as separate streams — "You" vs every other speaker, echo-filtered, in real time.
03
The chat reads the live transcript. "What did I miss?" "Who owns this?" — answers in seconds, without leaving the call.
04
When you hang up, ask the chat to post the summary and action items straight to Slack, email, or Jira via your connectors.
05
Recording stops, Claude writes the one-pager: key points, decisions, owners — stored next to the transcript.
06
Meeting audio streams to Deepgram for transcription, on the key we manage if you are on Pro or in the free trial, or on your own Deepgram key on the Free plan.
07
Checkpointed to disk every 5 seconds — survives crashes. Pause, resume, or hot-swap the language mid-call.
08
Every transcript, summary, and note lives in local SQLite, full-text searchable, and stays on your Mac unless you turn on Cloud Sync.
Routines records, transcribes, and answers — while your data stays exactly where it belongs. If Granola is the tool you are weighing, read our Granola AI review or the side-by-side Routines vs Granola comparison first.
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