Help

Meetings

Setting up, running, and getting value from meetings in Tana.

How do I create a meeting?

Select "Meeting" from the create menu (the pencil icon in the sidebar). This creates a new event with a Tana video call link. The meeting defaults to the current time (rounded to the nearest 5 minutes) with a 30-minute duration. If you create from a specific date in Today, it defaults to 9:00 AM on that date. You can change the date, time, and duration from the event view.

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How do I invite people to a meeting?

Open the location and access settings on the event to add people from your organization. Added participants can see the event, join the call, and access talking points and outcomes.

For people outside your organization, copy the guest link from the pre-call screen and share it. Guests join with a display name and do not need a Tana account. If a guest opens the link before anyone from your team has joined, they wait in a lobby and are let into the meeting automatically as soon as a Tana user starts the call.

Once in the meeting, guests see a resizable three-column layout that mirrors the host: meeting on the left, the live Meeting Digest in the middle (read-only, no pause control), and a surface column on the right that shows public documents pinned to the event and approved meeting outcomes. Cards carry the same coloured type badge that the host sees (Bug, Task, Idea, and any other type), plus thumbnails for artifacts. Clicking a card opens the doc in the public viewer. The surface column stays hidden until there is something to show.

If you are signed in to a different organization and click a meeting link for one you are not a member of, Tana asks whether you want to join as a guest, with the option to go back to your own org instead.

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How do I prepare talking points?

Click "Add talking points" on the event to prepare an agenda using the rich text editor. Other participants see the agenda appear in real time. During the call, talking points are accessible as a side panel. After the call, they become read-only on the event.

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How do I join a call?

When you open a meeting with a Tana call link, a pre-call Get Ready screen appears with a camera preview, audio and video toggles, and device settings (camera, microphone, speaker, background blur). The preview is marked with a "Preview" badge so it is clear you have not joined yet. If you do not have a working camera, the preview area shows "No camera detected" instead. Click "Join Meeting" to enter. From Today, you can also click "Join" directly on an event card when participants are already in the call.

If you have already been in the call once, a Re-Join button appears in the meeting toolbar that takes you straight back in without going through Get Ready again.

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What happens to a call when I navigate away?

Navigate away from a meeting and the call collapses into a small overlay at the edge of the screen showing the participant tiles. Click any tile to return to the full meeting view. A chevron toggle flips the overlay between the left and right edges, and the side you choose is remembered.

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Can I share my screen?

Any participant can share their screen. The shared screen takes the main view while participant videos move to a smaller strip. Multiple participants can share at the same time. Screen sharing is available on desktop and web. Mobile supports audio and video but not screen sharing.

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How does transcription work?

Tana transcribes conversations in real time. Each participant's audio is transcribed separately, so the transcript includes speaker identification and timestamps.

The transcription indicator in the call toolbar shows the live transcript in a scrollable popover. From there you can:

  • Copy the transcript text
  • Edit the transcript: select a segment to delete it, delete everything after a point, or wipe the entire transcript
  • View screen captures taken during screen sharing
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Can I capture my screen during a meeting?

When someone shares their screen, Tana automatically captures screenshots at regular intervals. Duplicate frames are filtered out so only visually distinct content is saved, and each unique screenshot gets an AI-generated description. Screen captures are available to AI when extracting outcomes, so the AI can reference what was shown on screen alongside what was said.

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How do I pause recording during a call?

Tana transcribes and captures screen content by default during calls. To pause everything, toggle off-the-record mode from the transcription indicator in the call toolbar. This stops transcription, screen-share capture, and external-meeting capture at once, so nothing about the conversation is recorded. An "Off the record" indicator appears for all participants so everyone knows recording has stopped. Toggle it again to resume. Use this for sensitive discussions, personal topics, or any part of the conversation you do not want captured.

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What can I do during a call?

Capture, Skills, and Generate live in the meeting toolbar (see Controls). Find and Pin and Create New sit alongside the talking points so you can pin existing docs or make new ones without leaving the call.

  • Capture: Extract a typed outcome from the last two minutes of conversation. Choose a type (task, bug, decision, etc.) and AI creates a structured document from the relevant part of the discussion. When Tana already knows the concept being captured, the in-progress tile uses its title (for example "Capturing iOS scroll bug...") instead of a generic "Capturing..." label. If you later elaborate on a captured item, the proposal updates in place without showing a new card.
  • Skills: Pick any skill and pin it to the meeting as a single tile that reshapes with the skill's lifecycle. While the skill runs the tile shows the skill name and a live progress indicator; once it has produced proposals, the same tile expands into a group stack of those proposals. Click either state to open the full conversation. Both states have a More menu and right-click menu with Open chat and Unpin from event.
  • Generate → Summary: Generate meeting notes from the transcript so far. A Summary tile also appears in the right column when the call has wrapped up, so you can run the same flow with one click after the meeting.
  • Generate → Extract items: Pull tasks, decisions, and other typed outcomes out of what has been said.
  • Generate → Storyboard, Customer Journey, Slides: Create a rich artifact from the meeting content.
  • Find and Pin: Search and pin an existing document to the meeting.
  • Create New: Manually create a doc, canvas, task, or typed entry linked to the meeting.

When anyone starts a capture, a tile shows up for all participants (for example, "Alice is capturing Action Item") so the room knows what's being pulled out of the conversation. If a capture fails, the error surfaces so you know it did not succeed. Pinned imagery, including screen captures and artifact scenes, opens in a full-screen viewer with copy, download, and arrow-key navigation.

The meeting also has its own chat surfaces. See Chat in the call for how AI responds in the private Your Meeting Agent and the shared Group Chat. When Your Meeting Agent creates new docs in the meeting, each one gets a Pin to meeting action so you can attach it to the event for everyone else to see.

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What can I do with a meeting after the call?

When the last participant leaves, Tana automatically generates a tagline and summary for the event, selects representative screenshots from screen shares, extracts action items and decisions as typed documents, and creates structured meeting notes.

Every call also produces one canonical summary document pinned to the event, with a deterministic title, a participants line, the tagline and short summary as a lead-in, and AI-written sections for Key Takeaways, Topics Discussed, and Next Steps. If anything went wrong while it was being written, Tana retries on the next webhook so the summary always lands.

You can re-trigger any of these manually from the outcomes section at any time. Re-running extraction updates existing outcomes rather than creating duplicates.

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Can I capture an external call?

The Tana desktop app can capture meetings happening in Zoom, Teams, or Meet without moving the call itself. This is useful when other participants are not on Tana or when you cannot change the meeting link.

  1. Enable meeting detection in the desktop app. This requires screen recording and microphone permissions on macOS.
  2. When Tana detects an active call, a notification appears: "Meeting detected."
  3. Click Capture on the calendar event, or use the ad-hoc capture button if the meeting is not on your calendar.
  4. Go back to the external tool to participate normally.
  5. Tana captures the audio for transcription and takes screenshots of shared screen content in the background.
  6. When the call ends (or you click "End capture"), Tana processes the meeting and generates outcomes.

The desktop app identifies speakers and correlates them with the transcript. If the meeting is not already on your calendar, Tana creates a matching event.

Auto wrap-up: External captures also get the same periodic mid-meeting wrap-ups and section refreshes that in-app calls get, on top of the post-recording wrap-up. The event picks up a tagline, a summary, and outcome proposals without you needing to open it.

One capture at a time: On the desktop app, an external meeting capture and an in-app Tana call cannot run at the same time. Trying to join a Tana call while a capture is recording shows a toast asking you to stop the capture first. Starting a capture while you are already in a Tana call is blocked the same way.

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Can I talk to Tana by voice during a meeting?

Tana's voice agent is a hands-free conversation partner that joins a meeting as a voice participant. It is available in any internal call: solo meetings as well as multi-participant ones. Start it by saying "Hey Tana" or "Hi Tana" (with localised equivalents in Norwegian, Swedish, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Dutch). Say "Bye Tana" or "Goodbye Tana" to stop it. While the agent is reasoning between your input and its first audio reply, a subtle progress sound plays so the gap does not feel dead; the sound is tied to the Call Sounds toggle in Settings, Advanced.

How to start it depends on the meeting shape:

  • Solo internal meetings: a 1×1 voice control tile appears in the meeting grid alongside the other participant tiles. Clicking it starts the agent.
  • Multi-participant meetings: the start action lives in the meeting overflow menu as Add voice agent so it does not crowd the toolbar.
  • External-meeting captures: the voice tile is hidden so the external-capture widget owns the slot.

When a Tana user activates the voice agent in a meeting with guests, the guests see the agent's tile and hear its audio. Guests get the same auto-mute toast and manual-unmute override that other participants get. Guests cannot activate the agent themselves.

The welcome meeting at the end of onboarding starts the voice agent automatically so you can speak with Tana right away. Subsequent visits do not re-trigger.

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Meetings - Tana Help