Open it from Minutes in the sidebar, or from the Capture menu at the top of the sidebar → Minutes. The top card is where a recording starts:

• Meeting title. Type a name such as "Acme kickoff". It becomes the note's name later. Leave it empty and Header uses the title of the calendar event you record.
• Record, the main button.
• Minutes style, which shapes what an Apple Intelligence draft or an Improve with AI draft emphasises (see reviewing the draft).
• Online call or In person, which decides what gets recorded.
• Keep audio on this Mac for 7 days, off unless you tick it.

Below the card you'll find UP NEXT (your next calendar event) and RECENT MINUTES, a searchable list of meetings you've saved. Click a saved meeting to preview it beside the list, then Open in Editor to work on it like any other note.

If Calendar isn't connected yet, click Connect Calendar on the Minutes page. The switch itself lives in Settings → Calendar → Use Calendar in Today and Minutes, and Header reads your calendar on this Mac only.

Once it's connected, UP NEXT shows the next event: its time and length, the calendar it's on, the attendees, and a chip for the meeting app with "join link detected" when the invite carries a link (or In person / no link when it doesn't). Click an attendee, or +N more, to see the full list and copy addresses.

• Join opens the link the invite already carries. Header doesn't dial in on its own.
• Record starts recording that event, with its title and attendees attached.
• For a meeting that isn't on your calendar, click New meeting in the top card. If you leave the title empty it's called "Started manually".

With nothing on the calendar, UP NEXT says Nothing upcoming to record and the main Record button starts an unscheduled meeting.

Online call captures your microphone and the call audio playing on this Mac, so a Zoom or Teams call is transcribed from both sides. In person captures your microphone only, which suits a meeting round a table.

Before recording starts, Header checks what it needs. If something is missing, a Recording needs attention box lists it with an Open System Settings link:

The Minutes card says it plainly: "Recording confirms participants know. Header cannot notify them." Letting people know is up to you.

To make that easy, when a recording starts Header copies a short consent line to your clipboard and the recording pill usually says Consent line copied — paste it in the chat (another notice can take its place). Paste it into the call chat or read it out.

The line reads: "Heads up — I'm recording this meeting to take notes. The audio stays on my computer. All good?"

Meeting cue. With Calendar connected, a small panel appears shortly before a meeting (one minute before, unless you change it). It shows the title, a countdown and the attendees. Click Join & Record (or Start Recording when the invite has no link). The arrow menu has Join only, Snooze 5 min and Dismiss. As the panel says, "Recording never starts on its own."

In-meeting nudge. If another app starts using the microphone and you aren't recording, Header can show Looks like you're in a meeting with a Start Recording button, or Don't ask for this call from the arrow menu. It checks only whether the microphone is in use, never what it hears. Meetings in a browser are recognised only when the calendar invite carries a join link.

Auto-stop. If you forget to click Stop, Header asks before stopping. For a calendar meeting, it waits until three minutes after the scheduled end and three minutes without new transcribed speech. For an unscheduled meeting, it waits for ten minutes without new speech. The pill then shows Meeting seems over — stopping in 60s with Keep recording and Stop now.

Speech recognition gets names wrong ("Akme" for Acme). Under any transcript turn, open Correct transcript span, pick the passage, edit the text and click Apply correction. Correcting the transcript clears the generated draft (your own notes stay). Click Retry to prepare it again from the corrected words. Corrections work once recording has stopped and speaker identification has finished.

The People section lists the speakers Header found, with how many transcript segments each one has. On an online call your microphone and the call audio are separate channels, so "you" and "them" are told apart. To tell several people apart, download the speaker models once in Settings → Minutes → Speakers (about 14 MB). They are two small on-device models: pyannote segmentation, which finds where each speaker starts and stops, and WeSpeaker, which tells voices apart. Identification runs on this Mac after you stop.

Click a speaker in People, or a speaker label in the transcript, to open Name and confirm speaker. Type "Priya", then Save draft to use the name in this meeting, or Confirm name to mark it as confirmed. Naming is optional; you can save without it. After naming, choose More → Regenerate with speaker names to redraft the minutes with those names.

Saved voices are off by default. Turn on Suggest saved voices on this Mac in Settings → Minutes → Saved voices. From then on, confirming a name saves a voice profile on this Mac, and the app says it never syncs it. In later meetings a familiar voice is suggested ("Matched remembered voice") but still waits for you to confirm. Remove one profile with Remove, or all of them with Delete all saved voices; deleting is permanent.

After you save, a FOLLOW UP list on the Minutes page shows the actions you accepted. For each one:

• Create task adds a checkbox task to the saved meeting note, with an optional owner and due date, so it shows up wherever your tasks do.
• Add reminder adds it to Apple Reminders. Choose a due date first; the button stays dimmed until you do.

Nothing is added until you click one of these buttons. If Header can't confirm which note the meeting was saved to, it won't add tasks or reminders from here; open the meeting under RECENT MINUTES instead.

Click Email notes during review, or right-click a meeting under RECENT MINUTES and choose Email notes. A preview shows the subject and, when the meeting came from your calendar, the attendees' addresses. By default the email contains reviewed items only. You can add more:

• Include transcript and unreviewed drafts
• Include my personal notes
• Attach Markdown file

Click Open mail draft. Header opens a draft in your mail app for you to check; it doesn't send the email itself.

• Regenerate with speaker names redrafts the minutes after you've named speakers, using the same on-this-Mac route as the first draft.
• Improve with configured AI… sends the transcript to the provider you set up in Settings → AI: a cloud key with Use cloud AI when available turned on, or Ollama (see Setting up AI). For a cloud provider (or a remote Ollama server), Header shows the send preview first, unless you've turned the preview off or chosen Don't ask again. If you cancel, or the provider fails, your existing draft and review choices stay as they were.

While an improvement is running, Save and Email notes wait so the privacy receipt can record what happened.

By default Header keeps the transcript and deletes the temporary audio once transcription (and speaker identification, if you use it) is done. The saved note's privacy receipt records this.

To be able to replay parts of a meeting, tick Keep audio on this Mac for 7 days on the Minutes start screen before you click Record; you can't turn it on once recording has started. The audio is saved when you click Stop, encrypted in Header's own app data on this Mac, not in your vault, and it expires after seven days. Then, on the review screen, each transcript line gets a Play audio excerpt button that plays the recording from that line (it says Play approximate audio excerpt when Header only knows the line's rough timing). A row under the meeting title has Stop replay and Delete audio, which removes it early. For a meeting you've already saved, right-click it under RECENT MINUTES for Play audio excerpt, which plays from the start, or Delete retained audio; both appear only while that meeting still has kept audio.

Apple Speech is the default. It transcribes on device; macOS may need to download language assets the first time. On macOS 26 it uses Apple's long-form recognizer. On macOS 14.4 and 15 it uses Apple's older recognizer, which works in one-minute segments that Header stitches together.

Whisper (whisper.cpp) is an English-only alternative that transcribes continuously on device after a one-time 142 MB download. It's worth installing for long English meetings on older macOS. In Settings → Minutes → Transcription, click Download model, then Use Whisper. To go back, click Use Apple Speech.

To see which engine your Mac will use, look at Settings → Privacy & Data → On this Mac. That card names your Mac's capability tier and includes a line such as "Meetings transcribe with Apple's long-form on-device recognizer." On Intel Macs, Whisper and the speaker models run noticeably slower. The tiers are explained in Setting up AI.