As Wispr Flow CEO Tanay Kothari chats with me about his company’s new Notetaker feature, my eyes keep bouncing to the corner of my laptop screen where Wispr’s AI tool is transcribing everything we say. It’s a verbatim record of our conversation generated by AI in real time, even down to my “mm-hmm” sounds while I listen to Kothari explaining why the startup, which is known for voice dictation, is dropping something new.
“This is the year of meeting recorders and notetakers,” says Kothari. And it’s hard to argue with that, at least in Silicon Valley. Most tech investors and other experts I’ve chatted with this year now assume whenever they meet up with someone to talk business that the conversation is going to be recorded or transcribed by AI, sometimes without explicit consent. The current option du jour for meeting records is Granola AI, with plenty of other options, like Otter AI, also available to users. So, the timing of Wispr’s expansion from a dictation tool into a meeting resource makes sense.
Wispr’s Notetaker connects to your calendar and can listen along during any meeting. After the conversation is over, Wispr uses generative AI to summarize the conversation and connect it to a chatbot-style tool for parsing its context with follow-up questions. The tool is launching first on Mac laptops, with a Windows expansion expected down the line. If you enable Privacy Mode for your account, then the data from your dictations will not be used by Wispr for AI model training.
In my initial test using Notetaker during a conversation with the CEO, the live transcription appeared accurate as it flashed across the screen, and I didn’t spot any obvious errors in its AI summary generated after our meeting. The “ask anything” tool felt like the feature’s best aspect. I had a quote in mind that I wanted to pull out, but didn’t remember when Kothari said it during our chat. So, I typed in “year of ai notetakers quote,” and the Notetaker tool found the moment that I remembered. When I checked it against my audio recording for accuracy, the AI-transcribed quote matched the audio file.
Users can fiddle with the fine details of Wispr’s Notetaker in the Mac app’s settings. One of the most notable aspects available here is the ability to extend the maximum meetings recording length to a whopping six hours.
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