Meeting notes

Click a meeting in the sidebar to open it. The transcript is on the left; on the right are three tabs: Summary, Ask and Insights.

A meeting with its transcript, chapters and summary

The buttons in the header let you:

Rename the meeting (the pencil).
Retranscribe audio; see Re-transcribing a meeting.
Re-detect speakers; see Re-detecting speakers.
Copy meeting as Markdown or as JSON, to paste elsewhere.
Export meeting…; see Exporting.
Delete meeting. This removes the transcript, summary, notes and action items from Parley. The audio file stays in your recordings folder until you delete it there.

Transcript

Each line shows who spoke, when, and what they said.

Click ▶ to play that line’s audio.
Click a speaker name to say who it really is; see Speakers.
Copy transcript copies the whole transcript with timestamps.

To find something inside transcripts, use Search meetings… at the top of the sidebar, which searches every meeting. Click a result under In transcripts to open the meeting at the matching line.

The transcript text itself can’t be edited. If it’s poor, try re-transcribing with a larger model or a fixed language, and add tricky words to your custom vocabulary.

The Chapters strip above the transcript lets you jump around the meeting by topic. Click Generate chapters to have the AI split the meeting into chapters (this happens automatically if Auto-generate chapters after recording is on). Chapter headings also appear inside the transcript.

Bookmarks you made while recording are listed here too. Click one to jump to it, give it a label, or delete it.

Clicking a chapter, a bookmark, a citation in Ask or the longest monologue in Insights also plays the recording from that point, for up to a minute. Click ■ on the playing line to stop it.

Summary

Choose a template with the template button (click it to cycle through them), optionally add Custom instructions such as “focus on the budget discussion”, and click Generate summary. The summary streams in as it is written, and you can Regenerate it at any time.

Summaries always include a title and overview, plus key decisions, action items and open questions when there are any, and your notes. Parley also uses the summary’s title to rename the meeting, unless you named it yourself or it came from your calendar.

Edit summary opens an editor so you can correct or add to it; click Save when done.

Summaries are written by the AI model chosen in Settings → Summary, and are saved as summary.md in the meeting’s recordings folder too.

Templates

Parley comes with two templates:

Standard Meeting Notes: summary, key decisions and discussion highlights.
Daily Standup: attendees, yesterday, today, blockers and notes.

You can add your own. Create a JSON file in ~/.local/share/io.github.hankanman.Parley/templates/, such as retro.json:

{
  "name": "Retrospective",
  "description": "What went well, what didn't, and what we'll change.",
  "sections": [
    { "title": "What went well", "instruction": "Things the team was happy with.", "format": "list" },
    { "title": "What didn't", "instruction": "Problems and frustrations raised.", "format": "list" },
    { "title": "Changes", "instruction": "Concrete changes the team agreed to try.", "format": "list" }
  ]
}

Each section’s format is paragraph, list or string. Restart Parley to pick up new templates. The repository has more examples, including project sync, retrospective and client call templates.

Notes

Under the summary, add your own Notes to a meeting. They’re included the next time you generate the summary.

Follow-up email

Draft follow-up email (in the Summary tab) writes a follow-up to send to the attendees, based on the summary and action items. Choose a Tone (Concise, Formal or Friendly), edit the Subject and Body, and copy them into your email app. Parley never sends email itself.

Ask

The Ask tab answers questions about this meeting, such as “What did Priya say about the launch date?”. Answers cite the transcript with timestamps you can click to jump there and hear it. To ask across all your meetings, use Ask Parley.

Insights

The Insights tab shows talk-time statistics worked out from the transcript (no AI involved): the meeting’s length and silence, how much you spoke compared with everyone else, questions asked, interruptions, and the longest monologue. Below that, each speaker’s share of talk time, number of turns and speaking pace.

Calendar event

The header shows the calendar event a meeting is linked to, with its time, location and attendees. Click Link calendar event to pick one from the week around the recording, or Change or unlink it.

Exporting

Export meeting… saves the meeting as a file:

Markdown, JSON, Word (DOCX) or PDF: summary, action items, notes, attendees and the full transcript.
SRT or WebVTT subtitles: the transcript only, timed to the audio.

Export to a notes folder (Obsidian)

To keep a copy of every meeting in a notes app such as Obsidian, open Settings → Integrations → Export folder and Choose… a folder, such as your vault. After every summary (and every time you save an edited summary) Parley writes a Markdown note named YYYY-MM-DD Title.md, with the title, date, duration, attendees and tags in its front matter. Sync all now writes or refreshes the note for every meeting that already has a summary, and the line beside it tells you if a note couldn’t be written. Parley only ever updates its own notes, but changes you make to them in another app are overwritten the next time that meeting’s summary changes.

Parley User Guide