An AI note taker for in-person meetings, with your Mac on the table

An AI note taker for in-person meetings records the conversation in the room and turns it into a transcript and notes. Dalm does it with the Mac already on the table: it listens through the Mac’s microphone, with no device to wear or carry, and works out who said what from that one sound — your own voice included. Speech is recognised on your Mac, the voices are told apart there too, and the audio is not sent anywhere; the transcript syncs to our servers automatically, and a language model reads that text to write the summary. There is a Free plan.

Starting a recording when the meeting is across the table

Open the Mac, and when the talk begins press Meeting in the menu bar panel, or ⌃⌥M. If you put the meeting into Dalm beforehand, a notification — “Your meeting is about to start” — arrives about ten minutes ahead with a Start recording button. You do not tell the app that this is a room: if the Mac is not playing any sound, the recording counts as a meeting in person on its own. While people talk, type what matters to you in the notes field — it reads “Write here — the transcript comes on its own” — and press ⌥M to mark a moment you will want to find later. There is no pause. Stop ends the recording; Cancel throws it away. If all you need is one conversation turned into text, the voice recorder page is the short version.

Who said what, from a single microphone

In a room there is one stream of sound, the microphone, and every voice at the table is in it — yours too. Speech is recognised on your Mac and the voices are separated there from that single stream; the transcript then syncs to our servers with a number or a name on every line. Because your voice does not arrive on a line of its own, the app asks about it as it asks about the others, and you answer “That’s me”. Naming is optional and the summary does not wait for it: until you answer, a voice carries the model’s guess or a number, and a guess is marked “Suggested by Dalm — check before you agree.” Someone who hardly speaks may not get a voice of their own and end up inside a neighbour’s. And a colleague you named in one meeting is a new voice again in the next. The method is set out on how voices are told apart and named.

What leaves the Mac after a meeting in the room

The speech is recognised on your Mac, and the audio of the meeting is not sent to us or to a language model. What travels is text: line by line, with times and voices, the transcript syncs to our servers automatically, and no setting keeps it on the Mac. A language model then reads that text and writes the summary. The audio is deleted once the text exists. Every part, piece by piece, is on privacy.

After the meeting: your notes, the summary and its quotes

What you typed during the meeting is what the summary grows from; the recording fills in the rest. In the meeting summary, each point keeps a word-for-word quote. Every quote shows you where it was said — open it and the transcript opens at that place. Everything you say lands in one archive you can search: meetings, phone calls, conversations in the room, and what you dictate to a model. A talk across the desk on Tuesday sits there next to the call that followed it.

A phone call on speaker counts as a meeting in the room

If the call is on your phone, put it on speaker next to the Mac and start a meeting. Nothing is playing on the Mac, so the call is recorded the way a meeting in the room is — through the microphone — and the voice on the speaker is told apart from yours like any other at the table. Calls in Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Slack or FaceTime on the Mac itself are taken differently, as two streams; the page comparing meeting recorders shows how. Steps and tips for a call on speaker are on phone call transcription; other ways to record a call made from a phone are in the guide to recording a phone call.

Saying out loud that you are recording

Dalm does not announce anything to the people around the table, and it does not ask them for anything. Before your first meeting it opens a page called “Recording conversations and consent” and suggests saying at the start, out loud, that you are recording; in a room that is one sentence before the agenda. The rules on recording consent differ from place to place, and a client or an employer can forbid what the law allows — if they do, that rule stands.

What Dalm does not do in a room

• It keeps no recording to play back: there is no player and no audio export.
• It gives you a draft while you talk, not the transcript. The draft, “What’s been said”, is marked as preliminary; the transcript is made when you stop.
• It does not count a very short talk: with fewer than 100 words, a recording is not a meeting.
• It has no pause.
• It does not know a voice from one meeting to the next.
• It does not record on a phone. The iPhone app is in development (iPhone version — join the waitlist); today it is a Mac app that needs Apple Silicon · macOS 15.0 or later and an account, and it is not on Windows. An app that records the room on a phone is compared with us here.

Free first, then the paid plans

The recording, the transcript and the summary of a meeting in the room come with the Free plan, and Free is a plan rather than a trial. While Dalm is not public, the way in is the waitlist. What the paid plans add is on the pricing page. If several of you meet clients in person and want the same names spelled the same way in every transcript, the Team plan gives a group one dictionary, plus shared templates and tags — more on working as a team.