How do I create a meeting?
Every meeting you make in Tana comes with a Tana video call link. Start one from wherever you already are:
- Ask the AI. Tell AI chat what you want, "set up 30 minutes with Jane tomorrow afternoon about the launch". A title and a start time are all it needs; the end time, location, description, and who to invite are optional. The meeting arrives as a proposal you accept before it lands, so you see the times before they are real.
- The New Meeting card in Today. One form covers both starting now and scheduling for later. Add who you are meeting with, then either leave the time on Now and click Start Meeting to go straight into the call, or set a start and end and click Create to put it on the calendar. Myself with screen share opens a solo session for recording a walkthrough. See Today.
- Meet now from People. Right-click a teammate in the People view, or in one of your constellations, and choose Meet now to open a call with them without scheduling anything.
- The create menu. Select Meeting from the create menu (the pencil icon in the sidebar), or the "+" on a date in Today. A meeting made this way starts at the current time rounded up to the next 5 minutes and runs 30 minutes; made from a date other than today, it starts at 9:00 AM. Change the date, time, and duration from the event view.
If the call is happening somewhere else, in Zoom, Teams, Meet, or a room with no video link at all, you do not create it in Tana. Capture it instead, and Tana makes the event for you. See External meetings.
How do I invite people to a meeting?
Open the event's details to add people. Add teammates by name, or type any email address to invite someone outside your organization. As you type, a second section below your organization's members suggests people you have had calendar events with before, so you can add a regular external contact without typing their address again. Because a meeting's attendees sync out to your connected calendar, everyone you add gets a real calendar invite in their inbox, carrying a short meeting link like meet.tana.inc/gtr-msnp-kwd. The meeting card shows that same short link, so what you see matches what your attendees got. Longer links to the meeting keep working. Added participants can see the event, join the call, and see the meeting's outcomes. The details panel shows attendees as an avatar stack with controls to add or remove people; only the organizer can change the invite list, and your own avatar sorts first. If you are an admin and an attendee uses your organization's email domain but is not yet a member, an Invite to organization control appears at the end of their row, opening Settings, Members with their email prefilled. It does not appear for personal domains like gmail or outlook.
You can also share the guest link from the pre-call screen for quick access without an invite. 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.
How do I prepare an agenda before a meeting?
Attach the material the meeting is about to the event itself, ahead of the call. In the meeting's Pinned section, use Find and Pin to attach a document that already exists in Tana, or Create new for a blank doc, canvas, or task to write an agenda into. Everyone invited sees what you pin, and pinned documents update live, so a co-organizer can add to the agenda before you start.
Pinning ahead of time also shapes what comes out of the meeting. Anything on stage during the call is drawn from the same pinned list (see Presenting), and when a meeting has a pinned document such as a Product Track or an open issue, extraction treats it as the subject of the meeting and updates it rather than creating a parallel doc.
How do I join a call?
When you open a meeting with a Tana call link, a pre-call device check 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 the call already has five or more people when you join, your microphone starts muted so you do not interrupt; unmute when you are ready.
If you have already been in the call once, a Re-Join button appears in the meeting toolbar that takes you straight back in, skipping the device check.
When someone is waiting for you in a call, Tana notifies you outside the app and takes you to the meeting when you click it: a system notification on the desktop app, and a browser notification on the web. Browser notifications must be enabled first from the Notifications row in Settings under Preferences.
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. It shows up to four participant tiles: one fills the overlay, two sit side by side, three or four form a 2×2 grid, and any others collapse into a "+N" count. The tiles prioritize whoever is speaking, anyone with a raised hand, and the active presenter, with screen-shares and camera-off avatars shown first. 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.
Can I share my screen?
Any participant can share their screen, including guests. The shared screen takes the main view while participant videos move to a smaller strip. Multiple participants can share at the same time. You start a share from the Present button in the toolbar; guests have a dedicated screen-share button. Screen sharing is available on desktop and web. On devices that cannot share a screen, such as iOS, the button is hidden.
Guests' shared screens are captured into the meeting's screen captures alongside everyone else's, so they appear in the digest and the post-meeting summary. If one of a guest's screenshots fails to upload, the guest sees a notice.
Does Tana transcribe meetings?
Tana transcribes conversations in real time. Each participant's audio is transcribed separately, so the transcript includes speaker identification and timestamps.
Transcription covers 33 languages. It follows your organization's default content language, set in Settings, Organization, Language, and still detects and transcribes the other languages spoken in the call, so a mixed-language meeting transcribes correctly without anyone switching to English. What the AI writes afterwards, including the summary, outcomes, and document titles, comes out in the organization's language whatever was spoken in the room; see Default content language. The Tana interface itself is English.
The transcription indicator in the call toolbar, or the digest, opens the transcript as a peek in place over the meeting, so you can read back without leaving the call; an Open full transcript button promotes it to the full panel, which a transcript link or the sidebar takes you to directly. Lines are grouped by speaker under elapsed-time dividers that stay put as you scroll, and text still being recognised appears as it arrives.
From either surface you can:
- Select a line, shift-click for a range, or extend with the arrow keys and Shift
- Copy what you selected with Cmd+C on macOS, or Ctrl+C on Windows and Linux; with nothing selected it copies the whole transcript, grouped by speaker
- Edit the transcript: select a segment to delete it, or delete everything from a point onwards
Wiping the entire transcript is a panel action, from its ⋯ menu — the peek deliberately leaves managing a transcript to the panel.
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. Captures appear in the digest timeline next to the discussion they belong to, not in the transcript, and they are available to AI when extracting outcomes, so the AI can reference what was shown on screen alongside what was said.
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. It covers everyone in the call, guests included. 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.
What can I do during a call?
The meeting toolbar's middle controls are Capture and Present; see Controls.
Capture turns the conversation into outcomes. It opens with a single lookback-window picker, how far back to read: the last minute, last 2 minutes (the default), last 5 minutes, last 10 minutes, last 30 minutes, or the entire meeting. After the call, the picker defaults to the entire meeting instead. From that span, pick what to make:
- Auto or a specific type: "Auto" captures whatever the discussion points to, or pick a type chip (Task, Bug, Decision, and any custom type) and AI creates a structured, typed document from that part of the conversation. 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.
- Artifacts: generate a rich artifact like a storyboard or slides from the conversation.
- Skills: run the built-in Screen share recap or Code prompt skill, or any of your own skills. A pinned skill becomes a single tile that reshapes with the skill's lifecycle: while it runs the tile shows the skill name and a live progress indicator, and once it has produced proposals the same tile expands into a group stack of those proposals. Click either state to open the full conversation, and use the More or right-click menu for Open chat and Unpin from event.
Captured results are shared with the meeting participants by default; the popover footer shows who the result will be visible to before you capture.
You can also capture a specific stretch of the conversation: hover a row in the live Meeting Digest and use Capture as… to open the same picker scoped to that segment's transcript span, or its ⋯ menu to Copy transcript segment (the section's transcript, grouped by speaker).
To add material yourself, use the Pinned section on the meeting surface: create a blank Doc, Canvas, or Task, or search Tana to pin an existing document. Creating a doc or canvas from Present also pins it to the meeting and puts it on stage. See Presenting.
A Summary tile also appears in the right column when the call has wrapped up, so you can generate the post-meeting summary with one click.
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.
On the meeting surface, a tile shows a state control inline and an assignee control in the corner for any item that carries a task or workflow state, plain tasks as well as typed items like a Bug, so you can move it to In Progress or hand it to a teammate without opening it. A plain document shows its kind (Canvas, Doc, Meeting), and a typed item keeps its type badge.
The meeting also has its own chat surfaces. See Chat in the call for how AI responds in the private Private Meeting Agent and the shared Chat With Everyone. When Private 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.
Can I chat during a meeting, and does AI work with guests present?
A meeting has two separate chat surfaces:
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Private Meeting Agent: A private chat for you and the AI, opened from the Private Meeting Agent button in the meeting toolbar. Only you see it, and the AI responds to every message. Use it to ask questions about the discussion, pull up context from Tana, or have the AI create documents without interrupting the room. The button shows when the AI is replying and surfaces an unread indicator if you have closed the popover, so you can leave it minimized and come back to it. The chat persists across reloads and stays with the meeting.
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Chat With Everyone: A shared chat visible to all attendees, opened from the chat button in the call toolbar. New messages surface as toasts and an unread badge for anyone who does not have it open; clicking a toast opens the chat anchored to that button. A short ding plays for incoming messages when the chat is closed; you can turn this off with the Call Sounds toggle in Settings, Preferences. The AI stays quiet by default. Mention @Tana when you want a response, so the human conversation is not interrupted. The chat is attached to the event and remains available after the call ends.
When a guest is in the meeting, AI is turned off in this shared chat: @Tana, agent and skill mentions, the
/command, and the Skill button are all removed, and a callout explains the pause. This keeps your organization's data out of a chat a guest can read. AI stays off for the rest of the meeting even after the guest leaves. Guests can still send and read plain-text messages; mentions, links, attachments, and dictation are member-only and not available in the guest composer. Your private Private Meeting Agent is unaffected.
Both use the same composer as AI chat, so you can reference documents with @, invoke skills with /, attach files, and dictate by voice.
What can I do with a meeting after the call?
Once everyone has left the call, Tana automatically generates a tagline and summary for the event, selects representative screenshots from screen shares, extracts action items and decisions as typed items, and creates structured meeting notes. This runs on its own; you do not need to click anything to start it. To run it earlier, a Wrap up button appears in the meeting's final minutes (or once it is overdue) and for participants right after leaving, triggering the summary and outcome extraction immediately.
When the conversation clearly points a task at a specific teammate, extraction assigns it to that person, and to several people when it was handed to more than one. If who owns it is ambiguous, the task is left unassigned rather than guessed.
If you pinned a document to the meeting, such as a Product Track or an open issue, extraction treats it as the main subject of the meeting and prefers updating that document over creating a parallel one.
Every call also produces one canonical summary document: an AI-written tagline and short summary, a participants byline, a wide illustration whose scene is drawn from the conversation, and sections for Key Takeaways, Topics Discussed, and Next Steps. After the call, the meeting's middle column becomes a Summary panel with a Summary and Timeline toggle, switching between the summary and the topic-by-topic transcript, plus Share and Edit buttons. The Share button opens the same routing menu as Send to on any document: copy a link, start a chat, send to a member or agent, run a skill or integration, and Download Markdown to save the summary as a .md file. If there was not enough conversation to summarize, the panel says "Nothing to summarize" instead of generating one. If anything went wrong while it was being written, Tana retries 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.
Can Tana record Zoom, Teams, or Google Meet meetings?
On the desktop app, Tana captures external meetings through your computer's own audio. Because it captures the audio your machine plays, it works across any meeting platform rather than a fixed set, and it is designed to be lighter on your machine and more reliable. This is the default capture mode on the Mac and Windows desktop apps, and it is not available on Linux.
A small always-on-top window opens a couple of minutes before a scheduled meeting so you can act in one click, with pause and stop controls right in the window. Its main button depends on the meeting:
- Open & Capture for an external meeting that has a join link. One click starts recording and opens the link, so a join that gets blocked never leaves you unrecorded.
- Capture Meeting for an external meeting with no link.
- Join Meeting for a Tana meeting with two or more people, which takes you straight into the call.
Click the window's title to open the meeting in Tana. You can also start a capture from the Today toolbar for a meeting that is not on your calendar. If someone else in your organization is already capturing the same meeting, the window names them and asks you to confirm before starting a second recording, so it is not recorded twice.
System-audio capture needs the operating system's microphone and system-audio permissions. If Tana does not have them, it will not start recording; instead it brings Tana to the front and opens Settings, Permissions, where you can grant microphone and system-audio access and try again.
In the transcript your own audio is attributed to you, and the other participants are split out as separate speakers ("Speaker 1", "Speaker 2", and so on). If the meeting is not already on your calendar, Tana creates a matching event for it.
Auto wrap-up: External captures 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: An external meeting capture and an in-app Tana call cannot run at the same time on the same device. 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.
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, Preferences.
Start it from the Add voice agent button in the meeting toolbar, available in any internal call whatever its size. In a multi-participant meeting you can also just say the wake word, and Tana briefly mutes the others while the agent listens to you. Once active, the agent takes a participant tile of its own with a Stop button. Voice agent is not available on external-meeting captures.
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.
In a meeting with several people, the voice agent only reads content that everyone present can access, so a private document one person can see is never read aloud to the room. Your voice agent is remembered if you stop it, leave, or reload the page, so it does not reset mid-meeting.

