Half the meetings on an EA's calendar aren't theirs to talk about.

An executive assistant sits in on more meetings in a day than almost anyone else in the building, and a meaningful share of them are the kind nobody wants summarised by a service neither the EA nor the executive chose: compensation reviews, reorg planning, a board member's pre-call, a hiring decision still being argued about. Typing notes by hand keeps them off any vendor's server, at the cost of the assistant's attention during the exact meetings where getting the wording right matters most.

What the corporate default already covers

An organisation already running Microsoft Teams often already has Copilot's recap feature switched on for some or all of its users, which produces a usable summary without anyone installing anything new — a real advantage over asking an assistant to adopt a separate app for meetings that already happen inside Teams. Granola and Otter add integrations neither of us match either: Slack and Notion for Granola, and a searchable shared workspace for Otter, so a note taken in one meeting is findable by someone else on the team without being forwarded by hand.

Recording the room without adding a name to it

Coii AudioNotes records the assistant's own microphone and the call's system audio as two separate tracks, without joining the call as anything with a name. For the meetings where a bot's presence would itself be the thing people remember about the call, that absence is the point.

What comes out the other side

A language model bundled inside the app turns the transcript into a short recap once the meeting ends — what was decided, what's still open, what needs following up — written from the actual conversation rather than whatever the assistant managed to catch while also taking their own notes by hand.

Telling two voices apart without a bot's feed

A meeting bot separates speakers using the individual audio feed the platform hands it per participant. Reading the Mac's own audio instead means that feed isn't there, so speaker separation works by voice print — matching each voice against the others already in the recording. A one-on-one between the executive and a single other person is exactly the case this handles most reliably; a larger call with several voices still works, with more room for two similar-sounding voices to be confused.

What it deliberately doesn't do

There's no calendar integration to auto-start a recording when a meeting begins, no Slack or Notion post when it ends, and no shared workspace the executive can browse without the assistant sending the file directly. Nothing here files itself anywhere; every recap is a document on the Mac that made it, one assistant's tool rather than a team's shared system. And it's macOS only, so an assistant issued a Windows laptop by the company won't get this from Coii AudioNotes at all.

The meetings where the choice actually matters

Most of an EA's calendar is routine enough that any notetaker would do — status updates, scheduling calls, standing check-ins where a bot's name on the roster raises nobody's eyebrows. The judgment call is the other kind: a conversation the executive would rather not have summarised by a vendor neither of them selected, on a server neither of them can see into. Coii AudioNotes is built for exactly those, not for replacing the shared, searchable workspace a whole team gets from Granola or Otter on the routine ones.

Working across time zones, without the network being the reason it fails

An assistant supporting an executive who travels covers calls at hours the office network doesn't reach — a red-eye layover, a hotel connection that drops mid-call. Transcription runs on the Mac as the meeting happens, and the summary is written there too, so a bad connection costs the call itself, never the notes that come out of one that already finished.

A day built from other people's meetings back to back

An EA's calendar is rarely one meeting at a time — it's a sequence, one call ending three minutes before the next one starts, with the gap between them the only window to send a follow-up email or flag something the executive needs before the next call begins. Writing a usable summary by hand in that gap means either compressing it to a sentence or borrowing time from the next meeting to finish it properly. A recap generated the moment a call ends removes that trade: it exists whether the next meeting starts on time or not, and reading it back takes less time than writing even a short one would have.

When the executive wants the exact wording, not the recap

A summary is enough for most calls, but not all of them — a legal nuance, a number quoted precisely, a commitment phrased a particular way that matters more than the gist of it. Because the full transcript sits alongside the recap rather than replacing it, the assistant can pull up the exact sentence a moment like that depends on, rather than having to reconstruct it from memory or admit that only the summary was kept.

Passing a recap to someone who wasn't on the call

Relaying a meeting to a colleague who wasn't in it is a normal part of the job, and it stays a manual step here — there's no automatic distribution list, no channel the recap posts to on its own. What changes is what gets forwarded: a written recap and, when it's needed, a transcript to quote from directly, instead of a paraphrase from memory composed under the pressure of the next meeting already starting.

Supporting more than one executive, or more than one Mac

An assistant covering two executives' calendars, or working across a desktop at the office and a laptop taken home, fits inside the three Macs one licence covers without needing a second purchase — the limit is devices, not calendars or executives. What doesn't scale past that is the licence itself: a second assistant, or the executive wanting their own copy to review recordings independently, needs its own $19, the same as anyone else picking this up for the first time.

A board pack, assembled from several separate calls

Preparing material for a board meeting often means drawing on several separate conversations that happened over the preceding weeks — a pre-call with the chair, a briefing from finance, a check-in with the executive about which items are still contested. Each of those, recorded and transcribed separately, gives the assistant something more reliable to assemble a briefing from than four sets of hurried notes taken across four different weeks, each written under whatever time pressure that particular week happened to bring.

What actually changes about the job

The meetings don't change — same calendar, same mix of routine calls and the few that aren't. What changes is what exists once one of the sensitive ones ends: a transcript and a short recap sitting on the Mac rather than either a hand-typed summary written under pressure or a machine-generated one sitting on a server the assistant didn't choose.

A recap the assistant edits before it's shared

Not every recap goes out exactly as generated. An assistant reading it back before forwarding it to the executive or a colleague sometimes trims a line, corrects a name the transcription got slightly wrong, or adds a sentence of context the recording alone wouldn't capture — who raised a point, or why a decision landed the way it did. That review step stays entirely in the assistant's hands: the recap is a document on the Mac, editable like any other, not a message already sent somewhere before anyone's had a chance to read it first.

Setting it up is the small part

The first launch asks for microphone access and permission to record system audio, the standard prompt any Mac app requesting audio triggers. No account, no admin approval, nothing to connect before the next call. The larger adjustment is remembering to start the recording by hand for the meetings that matter, rather than relying on a bot that used to join whichever calendar events it was configured to.

A performance review, sat in on but not run

An assistant occasionally sits in on a conversation they're not leading — a performance review, a difficult feedback conversation, a call where their role is simply to make sure something gets written down accurately afterward. Those are exactly the meetings where a bot's presence on the call would itself be noticed and remembered, and where handwritten notes taken by someone who's also trying to read the room are the least reliable record of what was actually said. A recording made without announcing itself solves the specific problem of that kind of meeting: an accurate account exists, without the act of taking notes changing how the conversation goes.

The difference between a recap and a decision log

A single meeting's recap is useful the day it's written; what an assistant often actually needs is a decision log spanning several meetings on the same topic — a hiring decision debated across three separate calls over two weeks, say. Nothing here builds that log automatically; each recap is still one meeting's document. What it does provide is the raw material — several searchable transcripts on the same Mac — to assemble that log from, faster than reconstructing three conversations from memory or from three sets of handwritten notes taken under time pressure.

Who this genuinely isn't built for

A team that wants every meeting searchable in one shared place, with notes posted to Slack automatically and pulled into a CRM without anyone touching them, has a real workflow that Granola or Otter serve and this one doesn't attempt to. This is written for the specific slice of an EA's week where the meeting is somebody's business alone, and the fact that a bot didn't need to be told not to join is worth more than the integration that would have posted a recap nobody wanted posted.

What it costs, what it runs on

Coii AudioNotes is $19, paid once, for three of an assistant's own Macs, with a 30-day trial needing no card and no account. It runs on macOS 13 Ventura or later, Apple Silicon or Intel. Against Otter's $8.33–$19.99-a-month tiers or Granola's $14-a-month Business tier, checked today, the $19 doesn't renew for as long as the job does. Full comparisons against Granola, against Otter and against Teams Copilot Recap cover what each of them does that this doesn't. The broader case for a Mac-native meeting notes app, what an AI notetaker without the bot changes, and what skipping the bot specifically does for a sensitive call are worth reading before settling on one tool for the whole calendar, and the adjacent case for a founder's own investor updates covers another job built around the same small, high-stakes calls. A wider round-up of private meeting recorders covers the rest of the field.