Tanay Kothari, the CEO of Wispr, is speaking to me while his company’s new Notetaker feature transcribes our entire conversation in real time, capturing even my “mm-hmm” sounds.
“This is the year of meeting recorders and notetakers,” Kothari says. The statement holds weight in Silicon Valley, where most tech investors and business contacts now assume their discussions will be recorded or transcribed by AI, sometimes without explicit consent. Granola AI currently leads the market for meeting records, though options like Otter AI remain widely available. This shift explains Wispr’s move from a voice dictation specialist into a meeting resource.
How the tool works
The Notetaker connects to your calendar and listens to any scheduled meeting. Once the discussion ends, Wispr uses generative AI to summarise the talk and links it to a chatbot-style tool for parsing context and asking follow-up questions. The software launches first on Mac laptops, with Windows support expected later. Privacy Mode ensures that data from your dictations is not used for AI model training if you enable it.
During my initial test with the CEO, the live transcription appeared accurate as it flashed across the screen. I found no obvious errors in the AI summary generated after our meeting. The “ask anything” tool felt like the feature’s strongest aspect. I had a quote in mind that I wanted to pull out, but I could not remember when Kothari said it during our chat. I typed “year of ai notetakers quote” into the tool, and it located the exact moment. Checking the result against my audio recording confirmed the AI-transcribed quote matched the file.
Users can adjust the fine details of Wispr’s Notetaker in the Mac app’s settings. One notable option allows you to extend the maximum recording length to six hours.
“Wispr had a six-minute time limit earlier. People would start it on and off five times just to capture a 30-minute meeting,” Kothari says. “We realized we should stop being stupid. This is what people really want Wispr to do.” That said, if you have the gall to invite me to join a six-hour meeting, just know that I’ll be blocking you on every platform imaginable.
Privacy and consent
Like Granola’s tool for capturing meeting transcripts, Wispr transcribes conversations directly on your device and does not join your meeting as a visible participant. Despite that, Kothari advises users not to secretly use the new tool. He recommends always disclosing when the software is transcribing conversations, potentially for legal reasons as well as out of respect for the privacy of the meeting’s participants.
“We need that to become the norm for everybody. Otherwise, you’re going to get a lot of lack of trust that starts to happen,” he says. “There are laws that are single-party and multi-party. I think, regardless, it’s just a basic trust-setting exercise to just make sure people know.” In San Francisco, where Wispr is based, someone recording a private conversation is legally required to acquire consent from all participants.
Voice dictation capabilities have improved significantly in recent years with the maturing of underlying AI models. I often find myself relying on tools like Wispr in my daily life. Whether I am organising notes on an academic research paper or searching online for reality TV updates about the current season of Big Brother, I am constantly speaking to my devices and expecting clear transcripts, even though I am prone to mumbling.
What I do not expect is for anyone to secretly transcribe my errant thoughts during a conversation. Break my trust even once, and it should be socially acceptable to ice you out of my life. And I hope you are writing that down.
