First Meeting

Before you start

A meeting needs four things. Whenever one of them is missing or needs a look, the setup screen lists it under Before You Start, below the source, with its state in words as well as an icon and the control that resolves it. When all four are satisfied the section is not shown, and the line beside Start Meeting says what the meeting will do instead:

Prerequisite	What it means	How to resolve it
Save location	The folder every meeting is written to. ScribeKit saves nowhere else.	Choose Folder…
Screen & System Audio Recording	macOS access to list and record this Mac's applications.	Grant it in System Settings, then Refresh
Speech recognition	An on-device model installed for the selected language.	Install it in System Settings, then Check Again
Audio source	At least one running application selected.	Pick one from the list, or Refresh

That is the list for App Audio. With Transcribe from set to Microphone, the two capture rows become Microphone access and Microphone input instead, and Screen & System Audio Recording is not asked for; see Microphone Transcription.

Start Meeting is disabled only while one of these is genuinely missing, and the reason is shown beside the button. When several are missing you are asked for one at a time, in the order above, which is the order they depend on each other: without a folder there is nothing to write, and without capture access there is no list to select a source from.

A prerequisite stops being reported the moment the state behind it becomes healthy — grant the permission and refresh, install the model and check again, choose a folder — so no warning outlives its cause.

Set the meeting up

The setup screen holds the configuration for the next meeting, top to bottom in the order the choices are made:

• Source — Transcribe from: App Audio / Microphone, and under it what that mode listens to: one or several running applications, each shown with its icon and discovered through ScreenCaptureKit with a manual Refresh, or the microphone input. See Capturing App Audio and Microphone Transcription.
• Meeting — the Title, which becomes the transcript's heading and part of the session folder name, and the recognition Language, fixed for the run and never detected automatically.
• Recording — for App Audio, whether audio is kept: none, raw or compressed. See Audio Retention.
• Save Location — the folder the session directory is created in, shown by name with its location below it. See Save Location.

The audio retention mode and the applications last selected are remembered across launches and matched against a fresh discovery each time.

Start

Starting a meeting resolves your selection against the applications running at that moment, creates a dated session folder in the save location, and creates transcript.md inside it before capture begins. A selected application that has quit produces a clear failure rather than a substitution.

From that point the configuration is fixed, and the Meeting screen changes from the setup form to the meeting itself.

While it runs

The top of the screen names the meeting and says what it is doing — Listening for a Microphone meeting, Capturing for App Audio, Paused, Finishing — with the elapsed time, the source and the language, and the Pause / Resume and Stop buttons. The transcript fills the rest of the window. The footer names the file being written and has Show in Finder; Details opens the state of capture, recognition and the files, including the captured-audio figures, for when something needs checking.

Partial recognition appears as an ephemeral guess and is replaced by the next one. Finalised text accumulates as transcript spans, so a sentence heard word by word leaves one entry rather than one per word — and only finalised text reaches the file. See Live Transcription.

Each finalised span is appended to transcript.md as it is recognised, so the file is readable in another editor while the meeting is still running.

You can pause and resume, close the window, or work in other applications; the meeting keeps going. See Background Operation.

Stop

Stop ends capture, lets the recogniser finalise the audio it already has, closes the audio file if there is one, then flushes and closes the transcript, and only then records the session as completed. Stop from the menu bar is the same stop.

The finished meeting stays on screen with its transcript and a summary of how it ended — finished, interrupted, or stopped by a failure, with what that means for its files. New Meeting returns to the setup form; nothing on disk changes. A meeting that could not start at all is reported at the top of the setup form instead, where the setting that stopped it can be corrected.

How a meeting can end

Three endings, and ScribeKit keeps them apart:

• Finished — you stopped it. Every artifact was flushed and closed.
• Interrupted — capture stopped without being asked to, so ScribeKit ended the meeting. Everything captured up to that moment reached the transcript and any recording, and both were closed. It is never described as finished, and ScribeKit does not continue it: start a new meeting.
• Failed — a durable artifact stopped being written: the transcript, the retained recording, or a recogniser that could not be brought back. The meeting was stopped rather than left running with nothing saving what it heard.

Whichever it was, the setup screen shows what happened, what it means for this meeting's files, and what you can do next, with a Show in Finder button for the transcript. See Failure Semantics.

Quitting during a meeting asks first, and stopping from that prompt finishes the transcript and the audio file before the application exits — quitting is not a crash, and does not leave a meeting for the next launch to discover.