# Record the whole day. The summary and the tasks come out on their own. Source: https://www.onsecondbrain.com/guide/recaps Language: en Spanish version: https://www.onsecondbrain.com/guide/recaps.es.md --- It records everything: a call on Teams, Meet or Zoom, a video or a voice note someone sent you, or a conversation in the room, through your computer's microphone or your phone's. Always, obviously, with the consent of whoever is on the other side. Recaps transcribe live, translate on the fly and also watch your screen to understand what is being discussed. What comes out the other side is a summary in the format you defined, sorted by theme, with the action items named and one tick away from becoming tasks. ## Recording ### Which sources go in - **Your microphone** — For in-person meetings, phone calls, or dictating to yourself. On a computer you record with the desktop app —the browser does not record recaps—, and also on your phone and iPad. - **System audio** — Captures whatever plays on your computer — Teams, Meet, Zoom, a video, an audio someone sent you — with no bot joining the meeting and nobody authorizing it. On iPhone and iPad too, where it is added to the microphone rather than replacing it: with headphones on, the mic never picks up the other end, and that is exactly the case of taking a call on your phone. - **Your screen · Pro** — Screen Comprehension takes snapshots at intervals and understands them: the slide being projected, the demo being shown, the shared document. What was seen enters the summary just like what was said. Desktop app only. - **Your phone** — Record from mobile and follow the transcript on your computer. And the other way around: if you left a recording running on the desktop, from your phone you can follow it live, mute it or stop it. - **Audio forwarded to you · Hobby** — The voice notes people sent you in another chat: forward them to the WhatsApp or Telegram bot and they come back as a recap with its summary, without opening the app. Several in a row end up in a single one. > **It is not on Android, and that is not a to-do** > > Android only lets you copy audio the system labels as media: a video, a podcast. A call — Meet, Zoom or a phone call — travels labelled as a conversation, and the system hands that to no app, permission or not. Shipping the control anyway would not raise an error: it would produce silence, and you would find out while reading the recap. On Android you record with the microphone, which does pick up what comes out of the speaker. While you record, the desktop app keeps a floating pill above everything, with elapsed time, the controls and a notes panel that feeds straight into the recap. You never go back to the window to stop it or to jot something down. ![The desktop app's floating pill, recording over whatever you are showing](https://www.onsecondbrain.com/screens/loops/grabando.jpg) _The pill floats over whatever you are doing: elapsed time, the controls, and a notes panel that feeds straight into the meeting recap._ ### What gets uploaded is already clean Between the microphone and the transcription there is invisible work going on, and it shows in two concrete ways. - Silence is not transcribed. Half an hour of an empty room used to leave half an hour of text invented out of the air conditioning. Not any more: what nobody said does not show up. - The voice is lifted only when it helps. In a noisy room you still understand whoever is far from the microphone; in a quiet one nothing is touched, because over-cleaning makes things worse too. - Lifting the voice happens in the desktop app. On the phone the audio goes in as is, on purpose: working on it there kills the recording when the screen turns off, which is exactly where most recording happens. And if any of that cannot be done, the audio is uploaded anyway: a meeting is never lost trying to improve it. ### Live transcription and translation The text appears while the meeting happens, not at the end. You can read what was said thirty seconds ago while still listening — exactly what saves you when you missed a number. - Real-time transcription, with punctuation. - The full transcript stays searchable afterwards. - The language is detected on its own from the first sentences, and stays fixed for the whole recording. It is deliberately not asked again every so often: five seconds with a single word can pass for any language, and the transcript would end up with a paragraph in each. - If you would rather decide it yourself, the selector wins: → Spanish pins the language and → English translates into English while transcribing, so you can follow a meeting in any other language in English. ![An open recap with its transcript](https://www.onsecondbrain.com/screens/guide/recap.png) _What you recorded stays as searchable text, with its meeting type and date. The summary and the notes are two more tabs of the same recap._ ### My voice: what you say, marked as yours A transcript without names forces the summary to guess who said what, and of all the differences one matters more than the rest: what you said versus what everyone else said. That is what My voice is for: you read five sentences out loud, once, and the app learns to recognise you. ![The modal to register your voice: five sentences, one minute, the audio is not stored](https://www.onsecondbrain.com/screens/guide/mi-voz-modal.png) _Five sentences, in Spanish or English, and one minute. What is kept is a numeric fingerprint of your voice; the audio is not stored._ - In every recap, what you say is marked as «Yo» (Spanish for "me"), with its timestamp. Everyone else's lines stay as they were. - Action items know whose they are. "I'll send you the new flow on Thursday" is yours, and the task is born in your name. "Martín, can you send me the plan?" belongs to someone else, and is kept as delegated. - If a stretch is too short or the voice is not close enough, nothing is guessed: it stays unmarked. Marking it wrong would be worse than not marking it. - There is nothing to switch on: once your voice is registered, it happens in every recap you record from then on. ``` [00:16] Yo: So we hide it behind a link. I'll send you the new flow on Thursday. The migration is going well; the rollback plan is still to be written. [00:44] Yo: Martín, can you send me the rollback plan before Friday? ``` > **Where you register it, and what is kept** > > You register it from the web or the desktop app (Settings → Profile → Your voice) or from your phone (More → Settings → Your voice). It is one per person, not per device: the one you recorded on one side recognises what you record on the other. What Secondbrain does with it, in Secondbrain Me. > > The audio of the sentences is not stored. You can delete the fingerprint whenever you want, and deleting it does not change the recaps you already have. ## What comes out of a meeting ### The summary · Hobby: in your format, not ours A generic summary is good for nothing. A one-on-one, a team standup, an interview and a lecture need different outputs, and that difference is not something to guess: you set it. So you define meeting types, and each type has its own summary template: which sections you want, in what order, at what level of detail. Executive, actions only, standup, interview, study guide, log, or whatever exact format you come up with. - Every recording is classified on its own into one of your types, and you can correct it. - The type learns: corrections and new recordings sharpen that type's profile over time. - Types also organize your recap library, which groups by type and by period. - A summary can be regenerated with a different template without recording anything again. With Auto-detect, the recording picks the format; when in doubt, it uses the general one. - If the recording matches an event in your calendar, the summary builds Participants from the people who accepted that invitation, instead of guessing them from the conversation. > **What to expect from a long meeting** > > Ninety minutes do not produce five action items: they produce dozens, because the meeting is read in stretches, end to end. In exchange, the summary of a long meeting takes a little longer to appear, and meanwhile you see which stretch it is on. ![The summary of a meeting, sorted by theme](https://www.onsecondbrain.com/screens/loops/resumen.jpg) _What was decided, what is still open and who takes what._ ### Action items: from what was said to what has to be done When the summary closes, commitments are extracted and kept in that meeting's Action items tab: who committed to what, and by when if it was said. - A candidate gets ticked and right then it is a real task, in your tasks. Unticking removes it, and ticking it again brings back the same one, with whatever you changed. You can also write them by hand. - The resulting task stays linked to the meeting it came from, to the person and to the organization discussed. - If the meeting said who does it, that person becomes the task's assignee, not just someone mentioned: it shows up in their board column without anyone dragging it. - And if a time was said — "Monday at 10 we send the proposal" — the task doesn't just fall due that day: it rings that day at that time. A real reminder is set up, with its notification. - What was already a task is not duplicated: it sits under In your tasks, pointing at the one that existed. - Decisions and Milestones go apart: they are saved on their own, hanging from their people and projects, with nothing to confirm. - On the web and desktop, each day in the Recaps list has a button to see the action items of all its meetings together, grouped by meeting, person, project, organization or theme: a five-meeting day gets swept in one sitting. > **A date and a time are not the same thing** > > A task falls due on a day: it shows up in "Today" and turns urgent. A reminder happens at a time and notifies you even with the app closed. Meetings usually say both, and both are kept. > > Only an actual clock time counts as a time. "In the morning" or "early" are not a time: that stays a date, which is what it is. ![A meeting's action items, each with an owner and a date](https://www.onsecondbrain.com/screens/loops/accionables.jpg) _Every commitment, with an owner and a date, ready to approve._ ### What you wrote while recording The Notes and documents written during the meeting tab gathers what was written in that window, without you pasting anything: - Your notes: what you wrote in the recorder or in the pill, still editable there. - Documents on the same topic that someone in the workspace edited while it was recording. - The daily note lines you wrote during the meeting that belong to the meeting. Anything else — "buy dog food" — stays out. - It links itself and moves nothing: the document stays where it was, and the recap shows up in its Related. If something does not belong, you remove it and it does not come back. ### Organize, cross-reference and share - **Linked entities** — Every recap links to the people, projects and organizations that came up. Later, from a client's Atlas entry, you see every meeting where they were discussed. - **Facets and grouping** — Your library is browsed by type, by period, by entity or by theme. At volume, it is what keeps it usable instead of just large. - **Merging meetings** — Two recordings of the same meeting — because it cut out, or because two people recorded — merge into one recap with a single transcript and a single summary. - **Sharing** — A recap is shared by inviting other Secondbrain users by email —to view it, or to edit the summary and the notes with you, live— or published to a read-only public link that stops working when you unpublish it. ### Where what you recorded ends up A recap does not stay on its own: it feeds the rest of the system. - Its action items go to Tasks and from there to the planner. - Its entities grow the Atlas and its wiki. - Its content enters global search and the context AI uses to generate documents.