Real-Time Meeting Transcription: A Practical Guide

Why Real-Time Transcription Matters

Taking notes during a meeting splits your attention. You miss parts of the conversation or end up with useless scribbles. Real-time transcription solves it — words appear on screen as they're spoken, and you stay present.

Audio Note has three real-time modes: Microphone, App Audio (for recording a specific app like Zoom), and System Audio (everything playing on your Mac).

Setting Up for a Meeting

Before the Meeting

1. Open Audio Note and select Realtime from the sidebar
2. Choose your audio source:
   • For online meetings (Zoom, Google Meet, Tencent Meeting, etc.): select App Audio and pick the meeting app from the dropdown
   • For in-person meetings: select Microphone
3. Pick a transcription model. The "Streaming" model is optimized for low latency — it adds words as they're spoken rather than waiting for full sentences
4. Click Start

If you need to evaluate latency, test with a short representative meeting clip on your own setup. The experience depends on the Mac, model, and audio source.

During the Meeting

• The transcript scrolls automatically. You can pause it anytime to review a section
• Use the flag button to mark important moments — these become bookmarks in the final transcript
• Speaker labels appear automatically if the model detects different voices
• You can type inline notes alongside the transcript without interrupting the recording

After the Meeting

Stop the recording. Audio Note saves the full transcript with timestamps and bookmarks. From here:

1. Click AI Chat and select Meeting Notes — it formats the transcript into structured minutes with attendees, discussion points, and decisions
2. Select Action Items to extract tasks with owner detection
3. Export as Markdown to share with attendees who missed the meeting

Tips for Better Results

Audio Quality Matters Most

Real-time transcription quality depends more on the input audio than the model. A few things that make a noticeable difference:

• Use an external mic for in-person meetings. The Mac's built-in mic can work in a pinch, but external hardware often gives a more stable input
• Keep the mic close to primary speakers and away from air conditioning, keyboard noise, and loudspeakers
• In a noisy environment, enable the noise filter in Audio Note's settings

Speaker Separation

Speaker separation is easier to review in small, quiet meetings. For larger groups or noisy environments, results are less reliable. A practical workaround: assign speakers manually after transcription using the editing tools.

Meeting Length

There's no hard limit on session length. Longer meetings produce longer transcripts, so editing, search, and AI cleanup depend more on your machine and project size. For important meetings, split recordings by agenda section or time block to make review easier.

A Note on Privacy

All real-time processing happens on your Mac. Audio Note streams audio through Whisper or Sherpa-ncnn locally, and the transcript is stored in the app's local database. Nothing is sent to a server. This makes real-time transcription viable for confidential meetings where cloud services aren't an option.