Meeting recorders compared by what you keep afterwards

A meeting recorder is whatever captures a call or a meeting in the room — the platform’s record button, a screen recorder, a bot in the call, a device on the table, or an app on your computer. What differs is what you keep: a video, a sound file or text. Dalm is a Mac app of the last kind. On a call it records your microphone and the call’s sound as two streams, without joining. You get back a transcript split by voice, not a file to play. The speech is recognised on your Mac, and no audio is sent anywhere; the transcript is synced to our servers. There is a Free plan.

Five ways to record a meeting, side by side

	What it hears	What you keep	Who has to allow it
The meeting platform’s own record button	The call, as the platform carries it	A file or a link to one, depending on the platform	The platform’s settings and your role in the meeting
A screen recorder	Whatever your computer shows and plays	A video file	No one in the call; you tell the others
A bot that joins the call	The call, as one of the participants	Whatever the product keeps, on its maker’s servers	Someone in the meeting lets it in, and it shows among the participants
A recorder or a phone on the table	The room; a call only if it is on speaker	A sound file	No one; you tell the others
A Mac app that returns text — Dalm’s kind	On a call, your microphone and the call’s sound as two streams; in a room, the microphone	A transcript split by voice, and a summary. No audio is sent anywhere; the transcript is synced to our servers	No one in the call; you tell the others

The first two and the fourth are the ways to keep a file. How the platform’s own recording works, and what to do when the button is not yours: recording a Zoom meeting, host or not, the same for Microsoft Teams and for Google Meet. If you are choosing between AI note takers, they are sorted by where the speech becomes text on a page of their own.

Which way fits what you need

• You need a video for people who missed the call — use the platform’s own recording or a screen recorder. Dalm gives you no video and no sound file.
• The record button is not yours to press — you can still record on your own computer, and the guides above cover each platform. Tell the people in the call first.
• The conversation happens across a table — a bot has no call to join. Something in the room has to listen: a recorder on the table, or your Mac’s microphone — a voice recorder that returns the conversation as text covers that case.
• You need to find what was agreed, not rewatch an hour — that is a job for text, and it is the job Dalm does.
• You need both the text and the sound — pick a tool that keeps the sound. Dalm keeps the text.
• You want to ask questions of a meeting after it is recorded — that is a different step: asking questions of a recorded meeting.

What Dalm leaves you instead of a file

When a recording stops, you get a transcript: every line with the time it was said and the voice that said it. Once the transcript is synced to our servers, a language model writes a summary from it — decisions, action items, open questions — and the audio is not part of what the model gets. More on what the times on each line are for.

What you do not get is the recording. There is no player for a meeting and no audio export, so there is nothing to rewatch or forward as a file. If a video for absent colleagues or a sound file for your records is the point, the platform’s own button or a screen recorder is the better tool, and it is better to know that before the meeting than after it. If the point is to find what was said without replaying it, text is what you want. Here is how a meeting gets from the call to a transcript you can use.

Everything you say lands in one archive you can search: meetings, phone calls, conversations in the room, and what you dictate to a model. Every quote shows you where it was said — open it and the transcript opens at that place. What opens is text, not a sound.

How it records a call, and a meeting in the room

On a call, Dalm records two streams on your Mac: your microphone, and the sound of the other apps — which is where the other people’s voices come from. Nothing joins the meeting. The permission macOS asks for before your first meeting is for system audio, not for screen recording, and the app is plain about why: “System audio recording is what meetings need: without it, the transcript has only you in it.” Without headphones, the other side’s voice coming out of the speakers is subtracted from your microphone after the recording.

In a room there is no second stream. The app takes the microphone alone, separates the voices from that one sound and asks which one is you — the button reads “That’s me”. A phone call on speaker is recorded the same way, as a meeting in the room. More on how the voices get told apart and named. If you are weighing a pocket recorder instead of an app, the comparison with one is set out by situation. What a whole meeting across the table looks like, from starting it to the summary, is on in-person meetings.

You start with Meeting in the menu bar panel or with ⌃⌥M, and the same press stops it. There is no pause, and a recording you discard is thrown away at once. When Zoom, Teams, Slack or FaceTime takes the microphone, a notification asks “Record this meeting?”; Google Meet in a browser is recognised only while a calendar event with a call link is running, and the prompt can be switched off. A recording with fewer than 100 words does not count as a meeting. Speech is recognised on your Mac, no audio is sent anywhere, and the transcript is synced to our servers automatically.

When something is not being recorded

A recorder that misses half a meeting without saying so is worse than none. If a call is running but no sound from the other side reaches the recording, the recording screen says “the other side is not heard”. Microphone trouble shows up as an error rather than as silence — “The microphone is busy in another app.”, or “The microphone went silent. Another app may have taken it.” Before an important call, it is worth checking your microphone.

Telling the people you record

A bot announces itself by appearing among the participants. Dalm does not appear anywhere in the call, so telling people is up to you. Before your first meeting the app shows a page about recording and consent and suggests saying, out loud, that you are recording; it warns no one itself, and it does not know who is on the call. The rules on recording consent differ by place and have a page of their own.

Free, Pro or Team: after the first recording

Recording, the transcript and the summary all come with the Free plan, and Free does not expire: it is a plan, not a trial period. The app needs a Mac with Apple Silicon · macOS 15.0 or later and an account, and until it is public you get in through the waitlist. What the paid plans add, and what they cost, is on plans and prices. If a group records into one shared space — one dictionary, shared templates and tags, and a privacy mode for a meeting the whole team should not see — see recording as a team. What else Free covers has a list of its own.