An AI note taker without a bot

Why the bot is the problem

Two separate objections get filed under the same complaint, and they have different fixes.

The first is etiquette. A named bot appears in the participant list of a client call and someone has to explain it, or nobody does and everyone quietly notices. For an advisor, a lawyer, a recruiter or a consultant, the first thirty seconds of a client meeting is not where you want a conversation about your note-taking software.

The second is coverage, and it is the bigger one. A bot can only attend a meeting that has a join link. The site visit, the walk to the car park, the trade show booth, the kitchen table, the dinner where the actual decision got made — none of those have an invite for it to join.

What the alternative looks like

chit is a card you hold. There is no participant, no invite and no software running on anybody's laptop. You hold the button through the conversation, or you hold it for thirty seconds afterwards and say what was decided — which is how most people actually use it, because a recap is shorter than a meeting and often more useful.

It records only while held, which is the property that makes it socially workable: it is visible, it is deliberate, and everybody can see when it stops. That is a much easier thing to say out loud than explaining what a piece of software in the participant list is doing.

How to record an in-person meeting well

The mechanics matter more than the equipment. A few things that make the difference between a usable capture and a wall of noise:

• Say it out loud. "I'm going to record my own notes on this" takes two seconds and removes the entire question.
• Hold it at conversational distance — the same distance you would talk to someone across a desk, not across a room.
• For the recap version, do it in the car before you drive off. Everything is still sharp and you are not performing for the room.
• Say numbers twice. Prices, dates and part numbers are what transcription gets wrong and what you needed the note for.
• Name the people. "Met with Dana and the ops lead" gives the transcript something to hang the follow-ups on.

What you get back

The $9 a month membership turns every capture into a transcript and hands the day back as a digest: what happened, what was decided, and what you promised. Ask-anything search runs across everything, so the question of what was agreed in that meeting six weeks ago is a search rather than an argument.

The device is $129 for chit one or $179 for the Pro, one time, with free 30-day returns. If the meetings you need covered are all on video calls, a bot-based tool is genuinely the better fit and you should use one — this is for the rooms they cannot reach.