The Problem
Meetings produce decisions, action items, and shared context — but only if someone captures them. The default approach is manual note-taking: one person types while trying to participate, or everyone leaves the room trusting their memory, and the meeting's value begins to evaporate immediately.
Manual note-taking during meetings creates a participation paradox. The person taking notes is less present in the conversation. They are focused on transcription rather than discussion, and they often miss nuance because they are trying to keep up with the pace of speech. The result is notes that are either incomplete (if the notetaker was participating) or low-quality (if they were typing frantically).
Post-meeting documentation has a different problem: delay. Notes written immediately after a meeting are reasonably accurate. Notes written two hours later, after three other meetings, are substantially worse. Notes written the next day are often reconstructions rather than records. The longer the gap, the more the meeting's value is lost to imperfect recall.
The average professional spends over twenty hours per week in meetings. Without reliable documentation, a significant portion of that time produces no lasting organizational value.
How Telvr Works for Meeting Notes
Telvr's Meeting Notes workflow works in two modes depending on your meeting setup.
Post-meeting recap (most common): Immediately after the meeting ends, open your documentation tool of choice — Notion, Confluence, Google Docs, a plain text editor — and press your Telvr hotkey. Speak a natural-language recap of the meeting: what was discussed, what was decided, who is responsible for what. Release the hotkey. The structured meeting notes appear at your cursor in under two seconds.
During-meeting notes: Keep a text editor open with cursor positioned in your notes document. At any point during the meeting, press the hotkey to capture a quick note, decision, or action item. Each dictation is processed individually and added at the cursor position, building your notes progressively throughout the meeting.
The post-meeting approach is more practical for most people, because it lets you be fully present during the meeting and document everything while it is still fresh. Speaking a meeting recap takes two to three minutes. Typing the equivalent takes fifteen to twenty minutes.
Best Enrichment Mode: Meeting Notes
The Meeting Notes mode is purpose-built for this use case. It takes unstructured spoken input about a meeting and produces a four-section document:
Agenda and Topics Covered: The subjects discussed, organized thematically rather than in strict chronological order. This gives readers a quick overview of the meeting's scope.
Key Decisions: Concrete outcomes — choices made, directions agreed upon, positions established. This is often the highest-value section for people who were not in the meeting.
Action Items: Assignments with implicit or explicit ownership and timelines. "We agreed Thomas would send the revised proposal by Thursday" becomes a formatted action item attributing the task to Thomas with a Friday deadline.
Notes and Context: Additional information that provides background, open questions that need follow-up, or context that makes the decisions more understandable.
This structure is designed for both the people who were in the meeting (as a memory aid and accountability record) and those who were not (as a summary they can act from without attending).
Before and After Example
Raw speech input after a product planning meeting:
"okay so we had the product planning meeting for Q2 uh we talked about the three main priorities which are the API redesign the mobile onboarding improvements and the dashboard analytics feature uh so for the API we decided we're going to do a full versioning strategy with v2 and deprecate v1 at the end of Q3 not Q2 because we need more migration time for enterprise clients um for mobile onboarding Marcus is going to do a competitive analysis by end of next week and then we'll decide on the specific changes in the following sprint uh the analytics dashboard is kind of on hold actually we're pushing it to Q3 because we don't have the data infrastructure ready and uh one more thing we also agreed to have weekly syncs every Monday at 10am for the rest of the quarter"
After Meeting Notes mode:
Meeting Notes — Q2 Product Planning
Topics Covered
- Q2 priorities: API redesign, mobile onboarding improvements, dashboard analytics
- API versioning strategy and deprecation timeline
- Mobile onboarding competitive research
- Dashboard analytics feature timeline
- Recurring meeting schedule
Key Decisions
- API v2 will be introduced with full versioning strategy; v1 deprecation moved to end of Q3 (extended to allow enterprise client migration time)
- Dashboard analytics feature deferred to Q3 pending data infrastructure readiness
- Weekly Monday syncs at 10:00 established for the remainder of Q3
Action Items
- Marcus: Complete competitive analysis for mobile onboarding improvements by end of next week
- Team: Schedule mobile onboarding changes for the following sprint after competitive analysis review
Notes
- V1 deprecation originally planned for Q2; extended due to enterprise migration requirements
- Data infrastructure is the current blocker for analytics dashboard development
The spoken recap was two minutes. The structured output is ready to share with the team and paste into any project management or documentation tool.
Time Savings
The time savings calculation for meeting documentation is compelling.
A one-hour meeting typically generates fifteen to thirty minutes of documentation work when done manually — writing notes, organizing them, formatting headers, identifying and separating action items. With Telvr, the same documentation takes two to four minutes of speaking and review.
For someone attending five one-hour meetings per week, that is seventy-five to one hundred and fifty minutes of documentation time per week reduced to ten to twenty minutes. Over a month, that is several hours recovered.
But the more significant benefit is consistency. Manual documentation is often skipped or abbreviated when time is short — which is most of the time. Voice documentation with Telvr is fast enough that there is no excuse to skip it. Teams that document every meeting consistently capture more institutional knowledge, have clearer accountability for action items, and make better decisions because they can reference past context.
Getting Started
- Download Telvr for macOS from telvr.ai and complete setup.
- Configure your microphone and set your push-to-talk hotkey.
- Set Meeting Notes as your active enrichment mode before your first meeting.
- After your next meeting, open your documentation tool, position the cursor, and immediately speak your recap.
- Review the output, add any details you want to expand on, and share with the team.
The habit that makes this most effective: treat the two-minute post-meeting voice recap as a non-negotiable close to every meeting. Do it before you check your next message, before you look at your calendar, before you do anything else. The freshness of the information in those two minutes produces documentation quality that cannot be replicated later.
New users get a €3 Welcome Credit to try all modes with no commitment. After that, you only pay for what you use — tiered pricing starts at €0.030 per minute and drops to as low as €0.003 per minute as your usage grows. No monthly minimum — less than the cost of a single hour of poorly-documented meetings.