Meet starts
A card asks whether to record. Record, Not this one, or Snooze. You tell the people on the call.
Guide
Transcribe a Google Meet call without a bot
To transcribe a Google Meet call without a bot, keep the transcript on your own laptop. The Recordist extension shows a live transcript from Meet's captions right in your browser, with no account, and the Recordist app transcribes the call's own sound and writes the notes. Nothing joins the meeting, and it works whoever hosts. We make both, and you tell the people on the call.
What Meet offers, and who decides
Meet's own AI notes are called Take notes for me. Google's help says the meeting organizer needs an eligible Google Workspace edition or Google AI plan, and its admin help lists Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Standard and Enterprise Plus, with an admin able to turn it off. Meet tells all participants that notes are being taken, and the notes document is saved in the organizer's Google Drive, in the Google Meet folder.
When you organise the call on one of those plans, that may be all you need. On a call a client organises, the notes are theirs to start and they land in their Drive. A transcript on your own laptop needs nothing from Google, and it asks nothing less of you: the people on the call still learn of it from you first.
A notetaker bot is the third way. It joins as a participant under its own name and records from its maker's servers.
In the browser: a live transcript, with no account
Add the Recordist extension from the Chrome Web Store, which Edge installs from too. Join the call in the browser and press Start transcript. The extension reads Meet's captions as they appear and shows a live transcript in the browser's side panel, beside the call, with the names the captions show. It starts when you press Start, never on its own.
The transcript is kept in your browser on this laptop. There is no account and no sign-in, and Recordist adds no server and no cloud of its own. When the call ends, copy it or download it as text, and delete it with one click.
The words come from Meet's captions, which Google produces, so the transcript is as good as the captions and in the language they show. It needs captions in that call, and the panel tells you when it finds none.
For the notes, the decisions and the follow-up email, record the call with the Recordist app as well. It hears the call itself, as the next section explains.
On your laptop: the call itself, then the notes
When Meet starts using your microphone in the browser, Recordist recognises it and a small card asks "Record this meeting?" By default it asks before it records, and nothing is written to disk until you click Record. On a Mac, Recordist names the meeting from the browser's window title; on Windows and Linux it shows as Browser unless the extension is paired.
Recordist records two channels: your microphone, and the sound your laptop plays, which is everyone else on the call. It transcribes that sound with Whisper on your laptop, so it needs no captions, no host setting and no Google plan, and it works the same whoever hosts. Your side is labelled You, and everyone on the other side shares one label for now, which you can rename for each meeting.
When the call ends, the transcript is already there. A few minutes later the notes follow: a summary, the decisions, the open questions and the action items, each linked to the line of the transcript it came from. On Pro, the follow-up email is drafted with the notes, for you to read, change and send from your own mail. The audio is kept on your laptop, for 30 days by default or as long as you choose, so you can press the time beside any line and hear it said, while the audio is kept.
The call ends
The transcript is ready. A few minutes later the notes are written, each decision tied to the line it came from.
The record stays
The audio, the transcript and the notes stay in a folder on your laptop. Nothing went to us.
Telling the others
Nothing joins the call and nothing appears in Meet's participant list, so telling the people on it is yours to do, as it would be with any recorder. In the browser, Tell the room copies a short line for you to paste into the meeting chat and send yourself. It never sends anything for you. In the app, Copy notice on the record card copies a short notice to read out or paste into the chat, and a second click while the call records marks the notice as given, with the time and the words, kept under the transcript.
If anyone says no, stop, and take notes by hand. Recording law differs by place: some places need everyone on the call to agree, some need one person. How to ask to record a call gives you the words and the rule where you and they are, and Recording law by place has general information.
Free and Pro
The extension and its transcript are free. Free for Mac, Windows and Linux. No account and no email needed. Windows and Linux are a preview. The Mac app is signed with our Developer ID and notarised by Apple.
Recording, transcription and search are free, with no time limit, and Free writes notes for 3 calls a month. Every install includes 7 days of Pro, with no card, starting with your first recorded call of 10 minutes or more. Pro writes up every call and drafts the follow-up email with the notes. Pro is $9 a month or $90 a year for anyone who subscribes by 30 November 2026, and that price stays for as long as the subscription stays active; from 1 December 2026 new subscribers pay $15 a month or $144 a year.
Questions
Does Google Meet have its own AI notes?
Yes: Take notes for me. Google's help says the meeting organizer needs an eligible Google Workspace edition or Google AI plan, an admin can turn it off, Meet tells everyone that notes are being taken, and the notes go to the organizer's Google Drive. On a call someone else organises, whether it runs is theirs to decide.
Does it work with a personal Google account?
Yes. Recordist does not use your Google account at all. It records the sound on your own laptop, so the kind of account you joined with makes no difference.
Does anything show up in the Meet call?
No. Nothing joins the call and nothing is added to the participant list. Tell the room in the extension copies a short line for you to paste into the chat and send yourself; nothing goes into the chat until you do.
Where do the audio and the transcript go?
They are kept on your laptop. The audio is never sent to us. With the built-in engine, the transcript and the notes are written there too. If you choose a cloud AI provider for notes, the transcript of that meeting goes from your laptop to that provider under your own account; that is your choice, off by default, and the Privacy Ledger in the app lists each request. A transcript taken by the extension stays in your browser on this laptop until you delete it. Its words come from the meeting's captions, which the meeting service produces.
Is it legal to transcribe a call?
The rule depends on where you and the other people are: some places need everyone on the call to agree, some need one person. The safe habit is to ask at the start. How to ask to record a call has the words for your kind of call, Recording law by place has general information, and your lawyer has the answer for your situation.
Related: Meeting notes without a bot in the call, the AI notes built into Zoom, Teams and Meet, compared, a Teams call in the browser, a Zoom web call, and Recordist and Tactiq, compared.
Google's own pages, read on 8 October 2026: "Take notes for me" in Google Meet, Let Google Meet AI take notes for my users.
Google, Google Meet and Google Workspace are trademarks of Google LLC, named here only to identify its products. Recordist is not affiliated with them. This page is general information and not legal advice. If something here is out of date, write to support@recordist.app and we will correct it.