Your meetings happen on your computer, but until now Cosmonote only lived on your phone. So you put the phone next to the keyboard, microphone pointed at the speakers, and hoped it would do. It works for your own voice. For everyone else, much less: their sound comes out of the speakers, mixes with the room, and the person on a slightly blown headset becomes unreadable.

As of today there is Cosmonote Recorder, a Mac app you can download at cosmonote.ai/mac. It records the sound coming out of your Mac, Zoom, Meet, Teams or simply a video, along with your voice on the microphone. Both go up together, and the note appears in Cosmonote on your phone, with the summary and the transcript, exactly as if you had recorded from the app.

An app that does one thing

Opening it will surprise you: there is almost nothing there. One window, a record button, a timer, a pause button. No note list, no search, no editor, no settings to explore. That is a choice, and it deserves an explanation.

The obvious move would have been to bring the whole app to the Mac. The same thing as on the phone, only bigger. That is what most note apps do, and it is exactly what we wanted to avoid.

When your notes live in two places, you no longer know where to look. You start a search on the computer, another one on the phone, you edit a note on one while the other is offline, and one day you find two versions of the same meeting summary. That helps nobody. So your notes stay in one place, your phone, and the Mac does not pretend to be a copy of it.

There is a second, more practical reason: the Mac is there to do what only it can do. Capture the sound of the other people in the call, the sound that exists nowhere else but in your audio output. Everything else, the app in your pocket already does well.

How it differs from a bot

For video calls, Cosmonote can already send an assistant that joins the meeting, with your calendar connected. That is handy when you want it to run by itself, including when you show up late.

But a bot is visible. It appears in the participant list, sometimes it has to be let in from the waiting room, and in some meetings that creates an awkward moment. The Mac recorder joins nothing at all: your computer is the one listening, exactly as if you were recording the room around you. Nothing shows up on anyone else’s screen.

Both ways coexist, and you pick per meeting. A casual team check-in: the recorder. A committee that owes a written record, while you are travelling: the bot.

How it works

You download the file at cosmonote.ai/mac, drag the app into your Applications folder and open it. It shows a QR code, you scan it with your phone, and the two are linked: the Mac app records into your Cosmonote account, the one on your phone.

macOS then asks for two permissions, the microphone and the system audio. They come one after the other, each one announced, because the two macOS windows look very much alike and we would rather tell you which one you are granting.

After that it is one button. You record, you pause if you need to, you finish, and the note shows up on your phone moments later. The app speaks eight languages and needs macOS 15 or later.

What we left out, and why

No search, no editing, no sharing from the Mac: all of that is waiting for you in the phone app, which also knows how to chat with your notes. Putting half of those features on the Mac would leave you wondering, every time, which side to do the thing on.

A tiny app has another advantage: it behaves. It launches in a second, it does not move into your menu bar to remind you it exists, it does not ask to be configured. You open it when you have a meeting, you close it afterwards.

If your meetings happen on your Mac, it is here: cosmonote.ai/mac. Tell us what you are missing, that is exactly what we listen to for what comes next.