How to never lose track of a meeting

Meetings consume an enormous share of professional life - and yet the outputs are chronically under-documented. Notes are partial, recollections diverge, and the follow-up email sent two days later bears only a loose resemblance to what was actually decided in the room.

Why manual note-taking fails in meetings

Research on divided attention consistently shows that simultaneous listening and writing degrades both activities. When you're taking notes, you're processing language at a surface level - not analysing, questioning or connecting. The irony is that the better your notes, the less you understood the meeting in real time. With Listen, you reclaim your full presence. The iPhone or Apple Watch records unobtrusively; you engage with the discussion, ask sharper questions, and pick up on the nuances that notes would have crowded out.

From recording to actionable output

Listen's automatic diarisation identifies each speaker and attributes their contributions - [Speaker A], [Speaker B] - so the transcript reads as a structured dialogue, not a wall of undifferentiated text. The AI then generates a concise summary, a list of decisions made, and a set of action items with their owners. This enriched record arrives in your inbox by email before you've left the building. For Agile teams who need this at every sprint, see our article on sprint reviews and retrospectives. For negotiation-heavy sessions, see salary and contract negotiations.

Start with the Listen user guide to set up your first meeting recording, or compare our plans based on your meeting volume.