Most meeting notes fail in the same two ways. Either nobody takes them — so a week later no one remembers who agreed to what — or someone volunteers to be the scribe and spends the whole meeting typing instead of thinking. Both are avoidable.
Live Notes is Traverba's on-device note-taker: you record a meeting (or import one you already have), and it hands you back a full transcript, a summary, the decisions that were made, and the action items — each with an owner and a deadline. No account, no setup, and because everything runs on your phone, no meeting audio gets uploaded to anyone's cloud.
This is a practical playbook. Not a feature list — a walk-through of how to actually run your meetings with it, from a quick one-on-one to a multilingual team call, plus the small habits that make the difference between "notes I saved" and "notes I used."
The 30-second version
If you only read one section, read this:
- Open the app and tap Record at the start of the meeting.
- Let it run. Live captions appear as people talk; you don't touch anything.
- Tap stop when you're done. You get a summary, key decisions and action items plus the full transcript.
- Export to PDF or DOCX, or copy the action items straight into your task tool or CRM.
That's the whole loop. Everything below is about doing it well.
Before the meeting: two minutes of prep
Live Notes needs no setup, but two minutes up front makes the output noticeably better.
- Put the phone where it can hear. For an in-person meeting, place it centre-of-table, mic unobstructed — not behind a laptop. For a video call, keep the room quiet and let the app capture the call audio.
- Name the meeting. A quick title ("Q3 roadmap — eng sync") gives you something searchable later and helps the summary stay on topic.
- Decide who's in the room. Live Notes labels speakers ("you" and "others"). Knowing up front who's attending makes it faster to relabel speakers afterward if you want named minutes.
- If it's multilingual, plan for Group Notes (see below) so everyone reads along in their own language rather than nodding politely at words they didn't catch.
During the meeting: let it run, stay present
The entire point is that you stop being the scribe. A few things to know while it's recording:
- Watch the live captions, don't manage them. Every word is transcribed on-screen in real time. Glance at it to confirm it's catching the conversation, then get back to actually participating.
- Speak decisions out loud. The AI writes down what it hears. If a decision is only implied — a nod, a shrug — say it plainly: "OK, so we're going with option B, and Maria owns it by Friday." That one sentence becomes a clean decision and a dated action item.
- It handles cross-talk and accents better than a human scribe who's trying to type and listen at once — but it can't invent what wasn't said. Clear verbal wrap-ups at the end of each topic pay off.
- It works fully offline. On a plane, in a basement conference room with no signal, on-site with a client — recording and transcription keep running because the AI is on your device, not in a data centre.
Meeting type 1: the one-on-one or client call
This is the simplest case and where Live Notes earns its keep fastest.
Record a check-in, a client discovery call, or a performance conversation. When you stop, you get:
- A summary — a sentence or two plus the topics covered, so you remember the shape of the conversation weeks later.
- Key decisions — each with the reasoning behind it, which is what you'll actually want when someone asks "why did we decide that?"
- Action items — with owner and deadline, ready to paste into your tools.
For sales and account management specifically: stop taking notes during discovery calls. Be fully present with the prospect, then paste the action items and summary straight into your CRM afterward. The client feels heard; your pipeline stays updated.
Meeting type 2: the multilingual team meeting (Group Notes)
This is where Traverba does something most note-takers can't. In a lot of meetings — especially in Hong Kong, where Cantonese, English and Mandarin get mixed mid-sentence, or on any international team — half the room is following in their second or third language and quietly missing details.
Group Notes runs a multi-person meeting where each participant speaks their own language and reads everyone else translated live, in real time — all feeding into one shared transcript and summary.
How to run it:
- Start a Group Notes session and have participants join.
- Everyone speaks naturally in their own language. Each person sees the conversation translated into theirs as it happens.
- At the end, everyone shares the same clean set of notes — one summary, one list of decisions, one set of action items — regardless of which language they spoke.
The result: no one leaves the meeting having half-understood it, and nobody argues later about what was agreed, because there's one shared record everyone could read live.
Traverba is tuned for Hong Kong's Cantonese-English code-switching — the "我想去 Causeway Bay 開會" pattern that trips up most international tools — so mixed-language meetings come out clean instead of garbled.
Meeting type 3: the meeting you already recorded (Media Notes)
Sometimes the meeting already happened. You have a Zoom recording, a voice memo, a webinar MP4, an interview you captured on a dictaphone.
Media Notes takes that file and does the same job in reverse:
- Import the audio or video file.
- Traverba transcribes the whole thing.
- You get a full transcript, a structured summary and action items — exportable to PDF or DOCX.
This is also how you clear a backlog. Batch-import last month's recorded calls and turn them into searchable, summarised text without re-listening to hours of audio. Journalists use it to turn interview recordings into instant transcripts; students drop in a recorded lecture and get clean revision notes.
After the meeting: turn notes into follow-through
The notes are only worth taking if they drive action. Build these three habits:
- Send the summary within the hour. Export to PDF or DOCX, or copy the action items directly, and share it while the meeting is fresh. A same-day recap is the single highest-leverage follow-up habit there is.
- Paste action items where work actually happens — your task manager, your CRM, a shared doc. Each item already has an owner and a deadline, so it drops in cleanly.
- Keep the transcript searchable. Weeks later, "what did we actually decide about pricing?" is a two-second search instead of an argument. Your titled, dated meetings become a genuine archive.
A few habits that make the output genuinely good
- Verbalise the close of every topic. "So, decided: X. Owner: Y. By: Z." The AI captures exactly what it hears — give it clean material and the action items come out clean.
- Relabel speakers if you want named minutes. For formal minutes, take a moment afterward to swap "others" for real names.
- Trust it enough to stop typing. The whole value is being present in the meeting. If you're still typing notes in parallel, you're not getting the benefit.
- Mind the privacy win. Because processing is on-device by default, sensitive client, legal, HR and board conversations don't get uploaded to a third-party server just to produce minutes. For a lot of meetings, that's the difference between "allowed to record" and "not."
When Live Notes is the right tool — and when it isn't
Reach for Live Notes when you —
- Want a summary, decisions and action items without assigning a human scribe
- Run multilingual meetings and want everyone following in their own language, live
- Handle sensitive conversations that shouldn't be uploaded to someone else's cloud
- Have a backlog of recordings to turn into searchable text
You may not need it when —
- The "meeting" is a two-line hallway chat that fits in your head
- You need a live, room-wide captioning display for a large event with dozens of attendees on their own phones — that's Traverba's event solution territory, a step beyond personal Live Notes
Get started
Live Notes is free — open the app and start recording; there's no account and no setup. It transcribes on your device in 30+ spoken languages, translates live, and hands you a summary, decisions and action items you can export to PDF or DOCX or drop straight into your tools.
Download Traverba free on Google Play and the App Store, and learn more about meeting and event solutions at traverba.com.
Your next meeting can write itself up. All you have to do is hit record — and actually be in the room.
Live Notes runs on-device by default; optional cloud AI is available for some features. Transcription and translation quality vary by language, accent, audio environment and device. Language counts and features reflect the app as of July 2026 and may change — check the app for the latest.