Recording a meeting

Parley records two things at once: your microphone and your computer’s system audio (whatever comes out of your speakers or headphones). That captures both sides of any call, in Zoom, Teams, Meet, Slack, Discord or anything else, without a bot joining the meeting.

Starting a recording

1. Open Record in the sidebar.
2. Optionally give the meeting a title. Otherwise it is called Meeting plus the date and time.
3. Click Start recording.

Important

Recording people without their knowledge may be illegal where you live. Let everyone in the meeting know you are recording.

While recording you can Pause, Resume and Stop. The timer doesn’t count paused time.

If your calendar has an event happening now (from 5 minutes before it starts until 15 minutes after it ends), Parley names the meeting after it and links the two. A message tells you when this happens.

Choosing devices and checking levels

Click Audio to open the device panel. Choose a Microphone and a System audio source, and watch the Mic and System level bars to check that sound is coming through. Your choice is remembered for next time. You can only change devices while not recording.

The panel is closed by default because the level meters keep your microphone open, which lights up your desktop’s “microphone in use” indicator.

Default devices can also be set under Settings → Recording → Devices.

The live transcript

Speech appears in the transcript a few seconds after it is spoken. Lines from your microphone are labelled Me and lines from system audio Speaker, until Parley works out who is speaking. Text that is still being transcribed is shown in italics underneath.

The transcription runs on your computer with Whisper. Your microphone gets echo cancellation, noise suppression and automatic gain, so you don’t need headphones. The microphone and system audio are kept on separate channels in the recording.

Bookmarks

Mark an important moment with the Bookmark button, the tray menu’s Bookmark this moment, or Ctrl+Shift+B while a Parley window is focused. Bookmarks show as time chips while recording, and afterwards in the meeting’s Chapters strip. The summary gives bookmarked moments extra weight.

Live action items (beta)

Turn on Settings → Recording → Live action items to have Parley pick out action items while the meeting is still going. They appear in an Action items card on the Record page.

When you stop

Parley opens the new meeting straight away, and finishes up in the background:

1. It works out who spoke when (see Speakers).
2. If you have downloaded a larger Whisper model (large-v3), it re-transcribes the meeting with it for better accuracy. While this runs, the Record page says Refining the last meeting….
3. If Settings → Summary → Auto-summarize after recording is on, it writes the summary, and with Auto-generate chapters after recording on, the chapters. Otherwise you generate them yourself from the meeting page.

Automatic call detection

Parley can notice when a call starts. It recognises Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Slack, Discord, Webex and Jitsi Meet, and web calls in Chrome, Chromium, Firefox, Brave and Edge, by watching which applications are using your microphone.

Choose what happens under Settings → Recording → Meeting detection → When a call starts:

• Do nothing.
• Notify me (the default). A notification asks whether to record, with Record and Open Parley buttons. The tray menu also offers Record … call.
• Record automatically. Recording starts by itself and a notification reminds you to tell the others.

Turn on Stop recording when the call ends to stop automatically about 8 seconds after the call’s microphone use ends.

Note

A browser using your microphone for anything counts as a web call.

The tray icon

Parley’s tray icon turns into a red dot while recording. Its menu shows the current status and lets you:

• Start, Pause, Resume or Stop recording, and Bookmark this moment. Starting from the tray uses your default devices.
• Open Parley, open Settings or Check for updates.
• Quit.

Closing the Parley window doesn’t stop a recording: the window hides and Parley keeps running in the tray. Use Open Parley to bring it back. If you quit while recording, Parley stops and saves the recording first.

If Parley closes unexpectedly

Audio is saved in 30-second pieces while you record. If Parley crashes or your computer loses power mid-meeting, the next launch shows interrupted meetings found. For each one you can Preview the transcript captured so far, Recover it (the audio is stitched back together), or Delete it.

Where recordings are saved

Each meeting gets its own folder in ~/Documents/parley-recordings/, containing audio.mp4 (AAC audio, microphone and system audio on separate channels) plus the transcript as JSON. Settings → Recording → Open folder opens it.

If you turn off Auto-save recordings, Parley keeps the transcript but not the audio, so you won’t be able to re-transcribe those meetings later.