Meeting note taking in Tana

Overview

If you have back-to-back meetings all day, it can be a pain to take notes and follow up on all the action items. This is where Tana can help.

Tana now offers a fully integrated AI meeting notetaker as part of the desktop experience. You can use it to transcribe meetings, generate summaries, and link notes directly to your work - without needing to install a plugin or add a bot.

• If you set up the Google Calendar integration, the Today page in Tana will be updated with all your meetings.
• Tana Desktop will also remind you with meeting notifications when the meeting starts, so you can simply click to capture audio and get an auto-generated summary directly in Tana.
• After the meeting you can go through suggested action items and tag the ones you want to flow to your Task dashboard.

Basics

Tana offers several features designed to make it easy to take meeting notes:

The Google Calendar integration:

• Automatically imports your calendar events to your Today page.
• Applies supertags to the events classified as meetings, so they're ready to record and take notes.
• Will show a daily agenda calendar with your meetings on Today.
• Tana Desktop can send you meeting notifications.

Tana meeting notetaker:

• Lets you record and transcribe your meetings in real time, directly from Tana Desktop - no bot required.
• It captures system audio, meaning it records not just your voice, but also everyone else’s - perfect for virtual calls, live streams, and shared audio. The transcription will try separate speakers with best effort, but since it does not have access to each speakers's audio, it may not give perfect results where there is similar voices or poor audio quality.
• This feature is ideal for situations where inviting a bot isn’t possible or preferred, and you still want to capture everything in one place.

The meeting agent (in-call bot):

• If you are not able to join a meeting in person, or need to join from mobile, Tana offers a meeting agent that you can add to your calls.
• It will show up in the meeting as a bot, provide a transcript of what each participant is said, create a summary and suggest action items.
• This is recommended in situations where it's important with high accuracy in speaker detection.

Task management:

• Tana offers a great way to take meeting notes and follow up on action items from meetings, since you can build a workflow for task management that works for you.
• Tag any action item from a meeting with #Task (or the task tag you use), and it will flow to your task dashboard.
• Click the #Task tag to see all your tasks, and customize views that make it easy for you to stay on top of things.

Detail

Get your meetings into Tana

The Calendar integration and meeting transcriptions are two intertwined features that are meant to work together, to enable you to capture meeting notes with one click.

The calendar integration is not just a convenient way to see your events on the day node. It is an opportunity for AI to help build out your knowledge graph:

• It syncs your meetings to Tana so you have a place to prepare for meetings, write notes and agenda points beforehand
• The Tana Desktop app can send you notifications about upcoming meetings, allowing you transcribe meetings and get an auto-generated summary.
• All notes are saved in the meeting, and you can use AI chat with the meeting notes, asking questions about what was said in the meeting or extracting information with custom prompts and commands.

Instructions for setting up the Google Calendar integration.

Tana meeting notetaker

This feature is ideal for situations where inviting a bot isn’t possible or preferred, and you still want to capture everything in one place.

No bots to manage: No external participants to add to your calls, just seamless recording.

Effortless: Start transcription with a click from your meeting notification.

Tool agnostic: Works with any tool or platform you’re using: Zoom, Meet, Teams, and beyond.

Cross-platform: Available on Mac and Windows with the Tana Desktop app.

Supports 61 languages: Tana auto-detects what’s being spoken and can dynamically switch between languages during the conversation. Full list of languages.

How it works

If you signed up as a new user after June 6th, you should have the meeting notetaker set up on the #meeting supertag, no further setup required!

1. Install Tana Desktop
2. Find the meeting supertag you want to use
3. Open "Configure tag
4. Enable "audio-enabled tag"
5. Start transcription in Tana Desktop:
   • Click the Tana meeting notification for any scheduled calendar event.
   • Create a new meeting manually by tagging a node with you #Meeting tag - then click the audio icon.
   • On Mac, Tana can detect when you open a meeting link and will offer to start transcription in a notification.

Set up meeting transcription on an existing supertag (detailed instructions).

During the meeting: Watch the live transcription

• Tana captures everything you hear from system audio, including other people speaking and shared audio like videos.
• It will capture audio from others, even if you’re wearing headphones.
• See the transcript appear in real time as the meeting happens, Shift+click on the "Transcript" button to open the live transcript in a panel next to the meeting notes.
• Scroll back if you missed something that was said.
• The transcription will try separate speakers with best effort, but since it does not have access to each speakers's audio, it may not give perfect results where there is similar voices or poor audio quality.
• Take your own notes in the main node if you want to. These will be included as context if you use AI chat on the node afterwards.

After the meeting: automatic summary and timestamped transcript

• Stop the transcription when the meeting is done, and Tana will automatically create a summary, and suggest action items.
• Review and tag action items, assign them to yourself or others.
• Create references to the transcript or tag things directly in the transcript.

If you are an existing user who want to set up live transcription on one or more existing supertags, see the full documentation here.

The meeting agent (in-call bot)

Tana also offers an in-call bot that you can add to scheduled calls. This requires more setup for each call than the Meeting notetaker, so is only recommended for situations where:

• You want high accuracy on speaker separation in the transcript - the meeting agent will identify speakers based on the audio streams in the call, while the Meeting notetaker will make a best effort based on differences in voice (but does not have access to separate audio streams).
• If you need to join the meeting on mobile, and still want automatic meeting notes and a summary.

When the Meeting agent creates notes, it does the following:

Writes a concise, interconnected meeting summary: Your meeting summaries are no longer siloed on a different AI transcription platform just for meeting notes. They now live in Tana with the rest of your knowledge, connected to things in the transcript and in your graph.

Creates action items based on the conversation: It identifies tasks that come out of a meeting, so you can tag them with #Task with one click.

Read more about the meeting agent.