Whether you have to tell people you're recording a conversation depends on the jurisdiction you and they are in, and on whether the law there requires consent from everyone on the call or only from you. This isn't a rule an app can settle, and it isn't the same answer everywhere — which is the one fact worth being sure of before recording anything you wouldn't otherwise mention.
The two shapes the law takes
Broadly, consent rules for recording a conversation split into two families: places that require only one participant — which can be you — to agree, and places that require every participant to agree, often called all-party or two-party consent. Which family applies can depend on the state or country each person is physically in when the call happens, and a call with participants in different places can mean more than one law applies at once. What is two-party consent covers that distinction in more detail.
Why this page won't tell you whether a specific call is fine
The honest answer to "do I have to tell people" is "check the law where you and they are, for the specific kind of recording you're making" — and that's a question for a lawyer licensed where the call is happening, not for a meeting notes app's documentation. Getting it wrong isn't a formality: in some places, recording someone without the consent the law requires is a matter with real legal consequences, not just an etiquette lapse.
Why it comes up more with a meeting bot
A tool that joins a call as a visible participant — the kind covered in what is a meeting bot — tends to make consent obvious by default, since everyone on the call can see it there. A recorder that only captures the audio your own Mac can already hear, with nothing joining as a participant, doesn't have that built-in visibility, which is exactly why the person running it carries the responsibility to say something rather than relying on the software to say it for them.
Where this matters most
The stakes are highest in the regulated professions this library also covers — lawyers and therapists record conversations that carry privilege or clinical confidentiality on top of ordinary consent law, and meeting notes apps for regulated work is written for that higher bar specifically. In every one of those cases, the software's job is to keep what it records off any server other than the one it's already on — never to make the consent decision on the recorder's behalf.
What Coii AudioNotes does and doesn't decide for you
Coii AudioNotes records whatever your Mac's microphone and system audio pick up when you start it, the same way any local recorder would; it has no setting that asks who's on the call or checks a jurisdiction, because that isn't a question software can answer. What it can promise is where the recording goes afterward — nowhere but your own Mac — which is covered alongside the rest of how it handles audio in Coii AudioNotes against Otter.