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Meetings·Privacy

How Noats tells speakers apart without learning your voice

Noats2 min read
Two brass microphones side by side on a linen cloth in afternoon light.

A transcript with three people in it is only useful if you can tell who said what. The decision that the customer is not renewing means something different depending on whether the customer said it or your colleague did.

Most tools solve this by learning what each person sounds like and matching them across every call. That is a biometric record, and it lives on their servers. Noats takes a different route.

What happens during a call

The speech that comes through your Mac's audio, which is every voice on the other end of a call, is split into segments, and very short sounds are left out. Each segment is turned into a compact description of the voice, and segments that describe the same voice are grouped together. That grouping happens on your machine, while the meeting is still running.

The result is a set of unnamed speakers. You give each one a name when you like, during the call or after it, and the transcript updates. If two people share a microphone at the far end of a call, they still come apart, because it is the voice that is being grouped, not the channel.

Your side of the call is always you

Whatever your Mac's microphone hears is attributed to you, so your own words are labelled correctly from the first second, with nothing to set up.

Why the names do not follow you into the next meeting

The names you assign belong to that meeting. Tomorrow's call starts with new speakers, and Noats offers the names you have used in other notes. When you record again in the same note, Noats recognises a returning voice and keeps the name you gave it. There is nothing to set up first.

Naming a speaker takes a few seconds, and the names you choose are saved with the note on your Mac. If you get a name wrong, rename the speaker and every line they said in the transcript changes to match.

The names are yours to give, during the call or after it.

What this looks like in the notes

  • The live transcript shows speaker labels as they are identified, and you can rename them in place.
  • The written-up note uses the names you chose, so the summary reads as a conversation between people, not between Speaker 1 and Speaker 2.
  • Renaming after the fact changes every line that speaker said.

Speaker separation runs on Apple silicon alongside transcription, with no network involved. The privacy page has the complete picture of what stays on your Mac.

Noats

Notes from the people building the meeting notepad that stays on your Mac.

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