Transcription & Summarization
How do I record a meeting?
Hold Control+Space for ~1s, or click Start Recording in the menu bar panel. Recording starts immediately — there is no second confirmation step.
Where the meeting appears depends on what’s already on your screen. If the meetings window is open in front of you, the meeting is hosted there in its live pane. Otherwise you get the floating overlay. Either way it’s the same recording.
While it runs you have:
- Prep — the notes you staged before the call (attendees, agenda, goals), editable at any time
- Assistant — live talking points and action items that update as the conversation moves
- Live transcript — streams in a side column as people speak, split into paragraphs at speaker turns. It shows the whole meeting, not just the last few minutes, and you can search it while the meeting is still running (⌘F). Toggle the column with ⌥⌘I.
Hold Control+Space again (or click Stop Recording) to end it. The window moves through its processing stages — saving, identifying speakers, attributing speakers, generating summary — and then shows the results without losing your place.
What does tapping the meeting hotkey do?
It depends on what’s happening:
| When | A tap of Control+Space does |
|---|---|
| Nothing is recording | Opens the meeting hub — your recent meetings |
| A meeting is recording | Shows or hides the live assistant |
Holding is what starts and stops a recording. Tapping never does.
How do I add prep notes before a meeting?
Click Prepare in the menu bar panel (it reads Edit Prep once notes are staged) and type attendees, agenda, or whatever you want the assistant to know. Prep is a separate button from Start Recording — you can stage notes without starting anything, and you can edit them mid-meeting from the Prep tab.
Does it work with Zoom / Google Meet / Teams?
Yes. Most AI notetakers join the call as a participant — a bot in the attendee list, a recording badge. MimicScribe captures system audio at the OS level via Core Audio Taps instead, so it works with any app that produces audio output — Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, FaceTime, Slack, Discord. Speakers are still identified on-device, just without anything joining the call.
Can it start recording on its own?
Yes, and it’s in beta. MimicScribe recognises three native apps — Microsoft Teams, Slack, and Zoom — and records those calls on its own. For calls in a browser it works from a list of meeting sites like Google Meet, so a matched site plus a live call is what starts a recording. Anything it doesn’t recognise it leaves alone: it won’t record and won’t prompt. Set it up in Settings > Meetings > Automatic Recording — see automatic recording for how each app is detected, which permissions each half needs, and when it stops.
How do I mark an important moment while it’s happening?
Press Control+Shift+Space. That’s a shipping default, registered only while a meeting is recording, so the chord isn’t claimed system-wide the rest of the time. There’s also a flag button in the recording toolbar, and its tooltip reads your current binding back to you.
Nothing plays a sound — a chime would go out through your mic to everyone on the call. The menu bar icon is the confirmation, and the flag button’s tooltip counts how many you’ve marked.
Flagged moments land in a Flagged Moments section above the finished summary, each one showing the verbatim transcript of what was said plus a short AI caption. Click one to jump to that point in the Transcript tab. The press timestamp is yours and can’t be wrong, so the transcript line is always shown — the caption only ever sits on top of it.
Can I ask a question during a meeting?
Yes. Press ⌘L (or click into the assistant’s input) and ask. The answer comes only from the live transcript so far and any reference documents you’ve loaded — if it isn’t in those, it says so rather than guessing. Questions and answers are saved with the meeting.
This is off for meetings you’ve marked offline, since it’s a cloud AI call.
How do I transcribe a file I already have?
Click Import in the menu bar panel and pick one or more audio or video files. You can also drag files onto the meetings window. Each file becomes a meeting, with speakers separated and a summary written, the same as a recording.
Most common formats work — MP3, WAV, M4A, MP4, MOV. A few containers macOS can’t decode are rejected rather than half-imported: WebM, MKV, OGG, Opus, FLV and WMA. Convert those first.
Importing a file uses one of your weekly file imports. See Free Tier.
Can I import from a link?
Yes. In the meetings window, use Import from URL…. A link that points straight at an audio or video file is downloaded directly. Anything else is treated as a page, and MimicScribe pulls the audio out of it using yt-dlp — an open-source helper it downloads on first use, verifies by checksum, and refreshes weekly. If you already have yt-dlp from Homebrew, yours is used and never modified.
How does speaker identification work?
A speaker diarization model creates voice embeddings for each speaker segment. After a meeting, you can name speakers directly in the Transcript tab of the summary view — hover over a speaker label and click the profile icon to assign a name. Once named, MimicScribe stores that voice profile locally and matches it in future meetings. Speaker profiles are suggested once there’s enough clean voice data — typically around 20 seconds of speech across a few segments (a single long turn or a couple of sparse ones can qualify with a bit more).
How do I name a speaker after a meeting?
In the Transcript tab of the summary view, hover over any speaker label (e.g., “Speaker 1”). A profile icon appears — click it to assign a name and save a voice profile. Named profiles are visible in Settings > Meetings > Speaker Profiles.
Will it recognize the same person in future meetings?
Yes. Named speaker profiles are matched against new recordings using voice embeddings. Recognition improves as more voice samples are collected across meetings.
How do I delete a speaker profile?
Settings > Meetings > Speaker Profiles — find the profile and click the trash icon. A confirmation dialog appears.
Two profiles turned out to be the same person. Can I merge them?
Yes. In Settings > Meetings > Speaker Profiles, select a profile and merge it into another. The voice samples from both are combined, so recognition afterwards is better than either was alone. A merge can be undone.
It asked “Is this you?” and I answered wrong. Can I take it back?
Yes. The confirmation has a single Undo that reverses the whole thing — the link, the voice samples it added, and the profile rebuild that followed.
Can it fix speaker names in meetings I already recorded?
Sometimes. When MimicScribe recognizes a voice it has heard before, it looks back through earlier meetings for the same voice and offers them as Suggested links. You review the list and accept or reject it; nothing is renamed behind your back, and anything it does apply can be undone.
What does “My mic is always me” do?
It skips speaker detection on your microphone and labels everything from it as you. Processing after a meeting is faster and uses less battery, and you never get a stray second “Mic” speaker.
The tradeoff: anyone else who speaks near your Mac is labeled as you. Leave it off for in-person and hybrid meetings. It also means a correction that would reassign something you said will be refused, since the mic channel is locked to you.
It applies to new recordings only — a meeting already running keeps whatever it started with.
What are summary views?
A summary view controls how a finished meeting’s summary is shaped. By default the summary adapts its structure to each meeting (the Auto view). Switch views on any single meeting from the summary’s “View” switcher, or set a global default in Settings.
MimicScribe includes four built-in views:
| View | What it produces |
|---|---|
| Simple | A single skimmable Summary, ordered by importance |
| Walkthrough | The meeting reconstructed in the order it happened, plus Open Questions |
| By Participant | One section per person — what each contributed — plus Open Questions |
| Decisions & Open Questions | A Summary, then Decisions, then Open Questions |
The four built-ins are firm: their named sections are produced whether or not the meeting cooperated. A view you write yourself is honored by the strength of its own wording.
How do I customize what the summary includes?
Settings > Meetings > Meeting Recording > Summary Views — each view carries its own guidance for what the AI should produce after a meeting. Edit a built-in view’s guidance (there’s a “Reset to Default” button per view) or create your own with a name, an icon, and the guidance it should follow. Set the global default here too. See Customizing for Use Cases for worked examples.
How do I ask follow-up questions about a meeting?
After a meeting, the summary view has two tabs — Summary and Transcript — with a text input at the bottom. Type a question or click the mic button to speak one (⌘L jumps straight to the field). You can also tap Control+Space when no meeting is recording to open the meeting hub and reopen a recent meeting.
How do I fix something the AI got wrong?
Use the same input. MimicScribe reads what you typed or said and decides what you meant:
- A question — “what did we decide about pricing?” — gets answered, and nothing stored changes.
- A fact to record — “this was with John Smith from Acme” — is saved as a note on the meeting. The summary body is untouched.
- A correction — “actually that was Sarah, not John”, “the budget was $50k, not $30k”, “there was only one speaker” — changes the stored summary or transcript.
Corrections need explicit framing: a fix verb, a contradiction, a complaint that the summary is wrong or missing something, or a claim about who spoke. A bare statement of fact is filed as a note rather than silently rewriting your summary. Speaker claims are always corrections — they point at the diarizer’s labels, which the app re-runs.
Can I undo an edit to a meeting?
Yes. Every edit — yours, a voice correction, an agent’s, or an automatic re-enrichment — is recorded in that meeting’s change ledger, and the meeting menu gives you:
- Undo the most recent edit, repeatedly, to keep stepping back
- Redo an edit you just undid
- View Edit History… to jump to any point on the timeline
- Restore to Original… to go back to the meeting as it was first saved
Restore is always listed, and tells you why it’s unavailable when there’s nothing to restore from.
Can I combine two recordings into one meeting?
Yes. Select two or more saved meetings in the meetings window — the multi-select action bar, or the right-click menu — and choose Merge.
Merging reconstructs the real wall clock: each source is placed by when it was actually recorded, so the two halves of a crash-split meeting land in sequence with their true gap, and two channel files of one session interleave into a conversation. When no source carries a real recording time (imports of files with no date metadata), they’re aligned to a shared start instead.
Speakers collapse into one person only when the evidence agrees — the same voice profile, or voices similar enough acoustically. Two meetings’ “Speaker 1” stay separate, because those are unrelated artifacts of two different recordings.
Merging deletes the source meetings and cannot be undone, so it asks first and lists what you selected. A meeting still being enriched can’t be merged.
What happens if the app quits mid-recording?
The audio is preserved. On the next launch you get a notice naming the meeting and when it started, with Transcribe Now — which runs the preserved microphone and system audio back through the real dual-channel pipeline, echo cancellation and Mic/Remote labelling included, rather than sending you to Finder to import two disjoint files by hand.
If you dismiss it, the recording stays in the meetings window as its own row with the same three choices — Transcribe Now, Show in Finder, Delete. Recovered recordings are kept for 14 days.
Live bookmarks and in-meeting Q&A survive a crash too: each one is written to a journal file beside the audio as it happens, and replayed when the recovered recording is transcribed.
Where are meeting recordings saved?
Transcripts and summaries are stored in a local database at ~/Library/Application Support/app.mimicscribe/mimicscribe.db.
Audio is separate, and covered in Audio Playback & Retention — where it’s kept, how long, and how to play a meeting back.
How do I get a meeting out of the app?
A saved meeting exports as Markdown, plain text, SRT or WebVTT subtitles, JSON, or CSV, and it can drop a Markdown note straight into a notes vault. See Exporting.
Can it summarize in a different language from the one spoken?
Yes — the spoken language and the summary language are separate settings, per meeting and globally. See Languages.
How do I search across past meetings?
Open the Transcriptions window from the menu bar panel. Use the search bar to query across all meetings with natural language — AI-enriched search results appear at the top. Search also matches speaker names: typing a person’s name (or a label like “Remote 2”) surfaces the meetings they spoke in, including where they were mentioned.