A meeting is full of things you never wrote down anywhere else: prices, opinions, health news, a client's worries. Before an app listens to it, you should know what the app keeps afterward. This page lists what can be stored and the questions that get a straight answer.
The short version: an AI notetaker can keep up to five things from a call: the audio, the video, a word-for-word transcript, a summary, and details about who attended. Apps differ a lot on which of these they save, for how long, and who can open them. Amlin keeps the transcript, your notes, and a summary as text and never stores the meeting audio. It has no video at all.
Two apps that both say "we take your notes" can differ on all five. Reading the privacy policy for these specific items tells you more than any marketing page.
Almost every AI notetaker sends something to computers other than yours. Turning speech into text takes heavy processing, and writing a summary needs an AI model, so most apps pay outside companies to do both. Those companies are called service providers or subprocessors, and a trustworthy policy names them.
Then there is storage. The finished notes usually sit on the vendor's servers so you can open them from a phone or another computer. If the audio or video is kept, it sits there too. Each place a copy lives is another place to be hacked, subpoenaed, or opened by an employee with access.
Start with the people you share with. Some tools make every transcript visible to your whole workspace until you change a setting, and some post summaries automatically to a chat channel or email them to every invitee. After that come the vendor's staff, who may be able to open stored data for support or abuse checks, and the providers named in the policy. A few vendors allow customer content to be used for improving their AI models, and the policy will say so, sometimes in a settings page rather than the main text.
If the answers are hard to find, that tells you something too. A good policy answers each in a sentence.
It removes one problem. With no bot, there is no extra attendee on the call and no copy of the video made by a guest account. It does not settle where your audio goes, because an app on your own computer can still upload sound for transcription and keep it. The questions above apply to every kind of notetaker. For how the two designs work, see notes without a bot.
Privacy runs both ways. Your client, candidate, or colleague did not choose your notetaker. In many places the law expects you to tell them or get their agreement before recording or transcribing. Saying "I'm using an app on my computer to take notes, is that okay?" takes five seconds. Keep in mind that a transcript can be forwarded, so the people you speak with are trusting your tool as well as you.
Amlin transcribes live on your Mac and keeps the text. Here is what its privacy policy says it does with your meeting:
Audio does leave your Mac for transcription, so Amlin is not an offline tool. You can read the full list of providers in the privacy policy. Recording consent is your responsibility under the terms. Amlin needs macOS 13 or later on Apple silicon, and the free plan covers 4 meeting-hours a month with full history. Pro costs $10 a month or $108 a year.
Many do. Bot-based tools commonly keep the audio, and often the video, on their servers so you can replay the meeting later. Other apps transcribe the sound and discard it. The vendor's privacy policy or help pages should say which, and how long a stored copy is kept. Amlin never stores meeting audio and keeps only the text.
You can, and so can anyone you share it with. Beyond that, it depends on the app. Some tools make transcripts visible to everyone in your workspace by default, and the company's own staff or its service providers may be able to access them under its policy. Check the sharing defaults and the list of providers the company names.
Some companies say they may use customer content to improve their models, and others say they do not. Look for a plain sentence about it in the privacy policy. Amlin's privacy policy states that it does not use notes or transcripts to train its own models.
Amlin streams meeting audio to its transcription provider, Deepgram, to get a live transcript, and the audio is discarded once transcribed. It sends note and transcript text to Anthropic to write summaries and answer questions. Fly.io hosts the synced notes. The privacy policy lists every provider and what each one receives.
In Amlin you can delete individual notes in the app at any time, and you can email support@amlin.ai to have your account and its data removed. For any other app, find the deletion steps before you start using it, and check whether deleting a note also deletes the stored audio.
It matters in two ways. Anything processed on the vendor's servers is a copy that leaves your control, and a bot has to send the whole call there. An app that listens from your own computer can still send audio out for transcription, so ask the same questions about it. Amlin does that for transcription only, then discards the audio.
Amlin's free plan covers 4 meeting-hours a month with full history.
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