Meetings - Tana Learn

Setting up a meeting

Calendar sync

Connect Google Calendar or Outlook from Settings to see your events on Home and the Calendar. See Integrations for setup details. Synced events appear with their original title, time, attendees, and meeting link. You can start a chat and extract outcomes from synced events the same way as Tana-created ones.

Connecting gives Tana read access. Grant edits with Enable edits in Calendar settings and sync runs both ways: events you create and manage in Tana appear in your connected calendar shortly after, and edits to their title or time, and deleting them, propagate back to Google or Outlook. Choose which calendar receives them with the default write target in Settings, Calendars. Until you grant edits, anything that would write to the provider, an RSVP included, tells you edit access is missing rather than failing quietly. See Read access first.

Creating 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 meeting card, from Meet on Home or by dragging a span on the Calendar. One card covers both starting now and scheduling for later. Add people from the picker, your organization's members first, plus any email address including people outside it, 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. Starting now also copies the guest link for you. The picker's confirm reads Invite when Tana will send real calendar invites and Add when it will only add people inside Tana, with a footer explaining which it is. Myself with screen share opens a solo session with the camera off, for recording a walkthrough.
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. 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.

Inviting people

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.

A recurring series carries a short link the same way, and it works for guests as well as members, so an external attendee can join any occurrence from the invite.

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, you land straight in the guest join flow. On the desktop app it opens in a dedicated guest window, leaving your own workspace untouched. Nothing reaches the host organization until you click Join on the pre-join screen, which shows that you are joining as your name · your org and notes that the meeting is hosted by another Tana organization, so the host sees your real name, photo, and home org rather than an anonymous guest.

Preparing the 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.

The call

Joining

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. You can also click Join directly on a meeting card on Home or the Calendar. 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.

Controls

The meeting toolbar at the bottom of the screen has the standard call controls and the actions you use during a meeting:

Mute (Cmd+DCtrl+D): toggle microphone
Video (Cmd+ECtrl+E): toggle camera
Raise hand (Cmd+Shift+KCtrl+Alt+H): automatically lowers when you start talking
Reactions (:): open the reactions popover for the six defaults, the full picker, and search. See Reactions popover below for keyboard shortcuts.
Settings: camera, microphone, speaker, background blur, noise cancellation
Capture: turn the conversation into typed items, artifacts, and skills. See During the call.
Present: put a document, canvas, or your screen on the shared stage for everyone to follow. See Presenting.
Private Meeting Agent: opens your private AI side chat for this meeting. See Chat in the call.
More: an overflow menu with Copy link, Record meeting (see Recording a meeting as video), and Delete. Only the organizer can delete, and the confirmation says that deleting takes the agenda, recording, and chat with it
Leave (Option+Cmd+LCtrl+Alt+L): end the call for yourself

The call shows only the people who are in it. Anyone on the invite list who has not joined is on the meeting card's attendee roster instead, so the stage stays given over to whoever is actually there. A participant with no name on file reads "Unnamed".

The same toolbar design is used across the pre-call device check, the guest lobby, and the live call. A muted microphone or camera shows a gray slash rather than a red highlight. On phones, the toolbar is laid out for smaller screens so the controls stay within reach.

The meeting uses a two-column layout with a presenter stage: whoever is speaking or sharing takes the main area, and other participants appear alongside. Camera feeds (or avatars) show names and indicators for speaking and hand raise. Side panels during the call give you access to outcomes and shared context with other participants. If your connection drops, Tana automatically attempts to reconnect. You can switch between meetings without dropping the call: jumping to another meeting keeps you connected through the transition.

The Reactions button in the toolbar opens a popover with the six default reactions, a "+" to open the full emoji picker, and a search. Once the popover is open:

1-6 sends one of the six default quick reactions
7 opens the full picker
Classic emoticons send the matching reaction without leaving the keyboard: :), :(, :D, :P, :O, :/, :|, :*

The popover stays open between presses so you can stream reactions in a row. Lowercase variants (:d, :p, :o) fall through to search instead of firing a reaction.

Participant tiles

A large call fills the gallery with participant tiles and folds everyone past it into a single "+N more" tile; a smaller window shows fewer tiles, because they stop shrinking past a minimum size.

Minimized overlay

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.

Voice agent

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 voice control at the head of the meeting digest, available in any internal call whatever its size. At rest it is a voice icon in a pill; it becomes the agent's avatar once it is engaged. Click it again to end the conversation. 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.

The agent follows the meeting, so you rarely have to explain context before asking. It has the day's agenda and the current meeting's details, what is being said, the meeting's pinned items, what is on the shared screen, and the outcomes captured so far. "What have we captured?" is a complete question.

Ask it for work and it runs the job in the background while the conversation carries on: looking something up, drafting or updating a document, finding related notes, or acting in one of your connected tools, including your own MCP servers. Several requests can be in flight at once. Each is acknowledged as you make it, and the result arrives in the agent's next reply at a natural pause rather than over whoever is speaking.

It can also present. Say "present the risks doc" to put a document pinned to the meeting on the shared stage, and "stop presenting" to take back off a document you put up yourself. It runs the same flow the Present button does, so access prompts and guests behave identically, and it knows what is on stage whoever put it there, so you can ask about what everyone is looking at. Documents that are not pinned to the meeting are out of scope, and the agent says so rather than guessing.

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.

Chat in the call

A meeting has two separate chat surfaces:

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.
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.

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.

Presenting

Put a document or canvas at the center of the meeting for everyone to follow, without screen sharing. Open Present in the toolbar to bring up a palette of everything you can put on stage:

Screen or Window: share your screen (see Screen sharing).
New: create a blank doc or canvas, pinned to the meeting and presented right away, for live notes or a whiteboard.
Pinned, Outcomes, and Recents: the meeting's pinned docs, docs created in this meeting, and your recently edited docs, narrowed to the types that can be presented (text and canvas). Type to search across everything else.

Picking a document pins it to the meeting and starts presenting. You edit the title and body live while everyone else follows read-only, seeing your caret in a document, or your cursor, viewport, and selections on a canvas. Followers auto-scroll to stay with you (canvases camera-follow your viewport); scroll or pan away and a Follow control appears to snap back.

Guests in the meeting can be given access to the presented document in one click, so an external attendee follows the same live document. Anyone who joins while you are presenting sees what is on stage.

You can also put an item on stage without opening the palette: right-click a pinned item, an accepted outcome, or a pending proposal on the meeting surface and choose Present document, or pick Present at the top of that item's Send to menu. Asking the voice agent works too (see Voice agent).

To stop, open Present again and choose Stop Presenting, which also ends a screen share. The Present button stays highlighted while you present.

Transcription

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+CCtrl+C; with nothing selected it copies the whole transcript, grouped by speaker. Cmd+ACtrl+A selects every line
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.

Recording a meeting as video

Record meeting, in the meeting toolbar's More menu, captures video alongside the transcript. The same item reads Stop recording while it runs, and it is unavailable while the meeting is off the record.

While a recording runs, everyone in the meeting can see that the meeting is being recorded, and the digest carries a Recording pill. Its popover shows the elapsed time and offers Stop recording, so only starting has to come from the More menu.

The finished recording plays back on the meeting afterwards. Deleting a meeting deletes its recording with it.

Recording state is read off the meeting itself, so asking the AI whether a meeting was recorded gives you the real answer and a link to playback rather than a guess.

Screen capture

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.

A screen share's captures sit together as a grid in the timeline. Click one to open it in place, step through the rest with the arrow keys, and use the back arrow for All captures. Each offers Download image and Copy image to clipboard alongside Delete, and Delete all clears the set behind its own confirmation. A guest viewing the gallery gets a read-only view.

Deleting a capture

To remove a capture you would rather not keep, such as an overlaid chat window or a frame that adds nothing, open it from its timeline row and choose Delete in the image viewer. It works during the share and after the meeting, and takes the capture out of the digest, the timeline, and everything the AI reads about the meeting. A guest viewing the gallery cannot delete.

Off the record

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, and recording as video cannot be started while it is on. 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.

Outcomes

Outcomes are the docs, tasks, typed items, and artifacts that come out of a meeting. Tana lets you capture outcomes while the conversation is happening, and automatically processes the full meeting when the call ends.

During the 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.

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.

Review and use

On the meeting surface, captures are grouped into Outcomes and a For Review list: AI-generated items wait under For Review as proposals until you accept them, and accepted items move to Outcomes. Right after the call the For Review section shows its progress: while Tana is still extracting, an "Extracting items…" row appears above anything already there; when nothing is waiting it reads "You're all done!", and if the meeting produced nothing to review it reads "Nothing to review from this meeting". Once accepted, outcomes are regular documents in the same space as the meeting. You can edit them, assign types, add fields, and work with them like any other document.

Each outcome can be shared with specific people or spaces, making it easy to distribute results to people who were not in the call.

External meetings

You do not need to move your calls to Tana to get transcription and outcomes. There are two ways to work with meetings happening in other tools.

Capture an external call

Capture leaves the call where it is and records it from the side, which is what you want when the other participants are not on Tana or you cannot change the meeting link. It runs on the Mac and Windows desktop apps, not Linux, and nothing records until you start it: every capture is one you began.

Capture with system audio

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. It runs on the Mac and Windows desktop apps, and it is not available on Linux.

A small always-on-top card opens a couple of minutes before a scheduled meeting so you can act in one click, with pause and stop controls right in it. 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 card's title to open the meeting in Tana, and End stops the capture and takes you to it. You can also start a capture from Capture on Home for a meeting that is not on your calendar. If someone else in your organization is already capturing the same meeting, the card names them and asks you to confirm before starting a second recording, so it is not recorded twice.

The companion window. Once a capture is running, that card becomes a fuller window you keep beside your call. It shows what Tana is capturing, carries the meeting's own title, and gives you the meeting assistant right there, so you can create actions and finish work without leaving the call. Drag it by its grip to move it, and its edge to resize it. Its top strip carries Collapse, which shrinks it to a one-row strip and back, and New window, which opens a Tana window for the organization the recording belongs to without disturbing the recording. It works with no Tana window open at all.

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.

If the meeting is not already on your calendar, Tana creates a matching event for it.

In the transcript your own audio is attributed to you. The other participants are named when enhanced capture is on, and split out as positional speakers ("Speaker 1", "Speaker 2", and so on) when it is not.

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.

Enhanced capture

Enhanced meeting capture in Settings, Preferences is on by default on the Mac and Windows desktop apps. It adds two things to a system-audio capture that the audio alone cannot give you:

Real participant names. Transcript segments carry the names of the people speaking, instead of positional labels like "Speaker 1".
Shared screens. Whatever anyone shares in the meeting is captured into the meeting's screenshots automatically, so you do not have to take them yourself.

To do this Tana reads which meeting window is on screen and who is currently speaking in it, which is why on the Mac it needs the operating system's accessibility permission on top of microphone and screen recording. Without that permission the rest of the capture still works, with recording, transcription and wrap-up unaffected, but speakers fall back to positional labels and shared screens are not captured.

The expanded capture panel's top strip always shows an eye icon telling you what enhanced capture is doing right now:

A blue eye means it is active right now: names and shared screens are being captured.
A grey eye means it is on, but no meeting window has been picked up yet.
A crossed-out grey eye means nothing is being captured: either you turned enhanced capture off, or you are off the record. Hover it to see which.
An amber crossed-out eye means a system permission is still missing.

Click the icon for a menu where you can turn enhanced capture on or off, jump to Settings, Permissions, or read about the feature. Turning it off takes effect immediately, including on a meeting that is already recording: no further shared screens are captured and no new speakers are named, while names already matched in that meeting stay.

While you are off the record nothing reaches the meeting, neither shared screens nor speaker names, and a blue eye turns crossed-out to say so.

Detecting a meeting you did not schedule

Detect external meetings in Settings, Preferences is on by default on the Mac and Windows desktop apps. With it on, Tana notices meeting-like activity from your microphone and audio even when there is no calendar event, and offers to capture it.

Tana only prompts for an app it recognizes: Slack, Chrome, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Discord, Edge, or a generic browser or call. Other audio activity does not trigger it, and a meeting in a browser tab only prompts when your camera is on too. A Meeting in progress card appears with Capture Meeting and Dismiss, headed by the matching calendar event's title when one lines up and Capture this meeting? otherwise, naming the app it detected. Dismiss it, or stop a capture while the meeting is still going, and Tana will not prompt you about that meeting again.

Host meeting in Tana

For meetings synced from an external calendar, the event organizer can replace the external video conference link with a Tana call. Click "Host meeting in Tana" on the event. All attendees are notified of the change.