AI meeting notes for Windows — no bot joins your call
Pithflow records a meeting from your own PC — the room you are in, or the Zoom, Teams or Meet
call you are already on — without adding a participant. Press stop, and you get a summary,
the key points ranked by how many times each came up, the decisions, and the
action items. The full transcript is one click away.
Most meeting notes are a summary and a to-do list, and the summary is where the important
thing gets buried. Pithflow orders the key points by how many separate times each
one was raised, and prints the count. If four people brought up the same problem in a
thirty-minute call, it is the first line, with a 4× beside it. Here is the
shape — an illustration of the format, not a real meeting:
Notes
Weekly product sync. The team agreed to move the pricing-page rewrite ahead of the onboarding email work, and to ship the Store screenshot refresh with the next release rather than as its own submission.
Key points
1.Pricing page rewrite is blocking the sales deck4×
2.Store screenshots still show the old sidebar3×
3.Onboarding emails can wait until the pricing copy is final2×
Re-capture the three Store screenshots on the new build.
Transcript ⇄ Notes toggle on the same card · Copy · Export as Markdown · Delete
The count is what makes the list honest. A point that came up once and a point that came up
five times are not the same weight, and a plain summary hides the difference.
Why we built it that way,
including the bug that briefly doubled every count.
How it works, in four steps
1
Open the Meetings tab
It is in the sidebar of the Pithflow app, next to Home and History. Click New meeting.
2
Say how you are meeting
In person records your microphone. Video call records your microphone and the audio your PC is playing — the other side of a Zoom, Teams or Meet call.
3
Tell the room, then record
Say you are taking AI notes. Then press record and forget about it — the app uploads as it goes, a minute at a time.
4
Stop and save
The notes are written from everything captured and land on the card: summary, ranked key points, decisions, action items. The transcript is one click away.
The notes arrive when you stop, not while you talk
There is no live transcript scrolling beside the call and no captions. While you record,
the app shows a clock and a level meter, and quietly uploads the recording a minute at a
time. The notes are written once, from the whole meeting, after you press
Stop and save — which is also why the key-point counts cover the whole
conversation instead of the last few minutes.
How does it hear a Zoom call without joining it?
A bot notetaker joins the meeting as a participant and listens from inside the call. That is
why it shows up in the participant list, why some companies now block them, and why a client
gets a "Notetaker has joined" notice on every call you have with them. The blocking is not
hypothetical: Fellow's 2026 round-up of bot-free notetakers
reports Google Meet flagging third-party bots from March 2026 and Microsoft Teams rolling out
the same between May and August, with enterprise Zoom tenants blocking them by default.
Pithflow does the other thing. Everyone else on the call is already coming out of your
computer — the meeting app plays them through your speakers or headphones. In
Video call mode Pithflow records that audio, the same stream Windows is
already playing, alongside your own microphone. Two streams, captured on your PC, uploaded
from your PC. Nothing is added to the meeting, no account is connected, and it does not
matter whether the call is Zoom, Teams, Meet, Webex or a browser tab — if it plays through
your computer, it is captured.
Because the two streams are physically separate, the transcript can label them:
Me for your microphone, Them for the rest of the call. It is
an honest label — it does not tell two other people apart, and Pithflow does not claim to.
Use headphones on video calls
On speakers, the other side reaches your microphone too — once through the call and once
out loud, in the room. Pithflow removes that echo from the transcript, but headphones are
the clean answer, and the app says so on the Video call card.
What Pithflow Meetings does not do
Worth stating plainly, because the bot-based tools do all of these and some people need them:
—It does not join calls for you. No calendar integration, no auto-join. You open the tab and press record, every time.
—It does not name speakers. Me / Them on a video call; nothing on an in-person recording.
—It does not transcribe live. The notes and transcript appear after you stop.
—It does not record calls on your phone. Windows PCs only.
—It does not tell the other participants. That part is yours — say it at the top of the call.
If per-person speaker labels and auto-join are the point for you,
Fireflies or
Otter are the honest recommendation, and both comparisons say so.
Why record from the PC instead of sending a bot
Ranked, not just summarized
Key points are ordered by how many separate times each was raised, with the count
shown. The thing that dominated the meeting is line one.
Works where bots are blocked
A tenant that refuses notetaker bots cannot refuse your own headphones. Nothing to admit
from the waiting room, nothing for an admin to approve.
One app for the meeting and the follow-up
The same Pithflow that took the notes
dictates the recap email
into Outlook or Gmail a minute later. Two jobs, one hotkey app.
Record your next call from your own PC
Nothing joins. Nobody sees a bot. The notes land when you stop.
Competitor behaviour is described as those products document it on their own sites; the
per-product detail is on the
Fireflies,
Granola and
Otter pages.
Two rows are concessions: live transcripts and per-person names are things Pithflow does not do.
What it costs
Meetings is part of Pithflow, not a separate product. On the free plan a
single recording stops at 15 minutes, and the audio counts toward the weekly free allowance
— about one real meeting a week, enough to see the notes on your own calls before paying.
Pro ($9.99 USD a month, or $99 a year) and Team have no
per-meeting cap. Everything else, including the dictation side of the app, is on the
pricing page.
Where the recording goes
Each minute of audio is uploaded, transcribed, and discarded — the audio is not kept. What
is kept is the text: the transcript and the notes are saved to your Pithflow account so
they are there next time you open the app, and they stay until you delete the meeting or
close the account. This is the one place Pithflow stores anything you said; ordinary
dictation is never kept on our servers. The
privacy policy names every
company that touches the data, and if you connect the
Pithflow connector to an
AI assistant, that assistant can read the meetings you recorded — and only those.
Frequently asked questions
Does Pithflow join my Zoom, Teams, or Google Meet call?
No. Nothing joins the call and nobody sees a new participant. Pithflow runs on your Windows PC and, in Video call mode, records your microphone together with the audio your computer is playing — which on a call is everyone else. The meeting looks exactly the way it always does.
Do I get the notes while the meeting is still running?
No. While you record you see an elapsed clock and a level meter. The recording uploads in the background a minute at a time, and when you press Stop and save, Pithflow writes the notes from everything that was captured. They land in the Meetings tab, usually within a minute of stopping.
What do the notes contain?
A short summary, the key points numbered and ranked by how many separate times each one came up — with that count shown beside it — then the decisions that were stated, then the action items. The full transcript is one click away on the same card, and you can copy the notes or export them as a Markdown file.
Can it write meeting minutes?
That is close to what the notes already are. Minutes are conventionally a record of what was discussed, what was decided and who has to do what, and the notes come out in those sections: a summary, the key points ranked by how many times each came up, then decisions, then action items. What Pithflow does not do is attendance, motions and votes by name, because it does not identify individual speakers. For a board or committee that needs named attribution, treat the export as the raw material for the minutes rather than the minutes themselves.
Does it tell me who said what?
Partly. On a video call the transcript is split into Me (your microphone) and Them (the rest of the call). It does not tell two other people apart, and an in-person recording has no labels at all — one microphone hears the whole room. If you need per-person speaker names, a bot-based notetaker is the better tool for that.
How long can a meeting be?
On the free plan a single recording stops at 15 minutes, and meeting audio counts toward the weekly free allowance, so it works out to about one real meeting a week. Pro and Team have no per-meeting cap. Long meetings are uploaded a minute at a time, so an hour does not sit in memory or wait on one giant upload.
Is the recording stored?
The audio is not. Each minute is transcribed and then discarded — only the text is kept. The transcript and the notes are saved to your Pithflow account, on our servers, so they are there when you open the app again. Delete a meeting and its transcript and notes go with it.
Do I have to tell people I am recording?
Yes — say so at the start, every time. Pithflow does not announce itself to the other participants and shows no notice on their side, so the responsibility is yours. Several US states require everyone on the call to agree, and a bot in the participant list would not count as consent anyway. Our post on recording consent covers the specifics.
Does it work in Spanish, or in a meeting that switches languages?
Yes. The language is detected from the audio, and the notes are written in the language the meeting was held in. A meeting that moves between English and Spanish is transcribed as spoken.
Which version do I need?
Pithflow 1.34 or newer on Windows 10 or 11. Direct-download installs update themselves; Microsoft Store installs receive it once Microsoft finishes certifying the release.
