Where we work · the United States
AI meeting notes in the United States.
Every US meeting-notes tool writes about recording calls; almost nobody writes about the conference room, where consent rules turn on a reasonable expectation of privacy rather than a Zoom link.
American work is not all on Zoom. Depositions, clinic huddles, dealership walk-arounds, church board meetings, city planning sessions, contractor site visits and job interviews all happen with everyone in the same room. Bot-based notetakers cannot help with any of them, because there is no call for a bot to join. GetNotes records the room from a phone on the table, labels each speaker, and returns a summary, the decisions and action items with owners.
Consent is the part US readers actually search for, and the honest answer is that it varies. Federal wiretap law works on a one-party rule, meaning one participant's consent is enough. A number of states go further and expect everyone recorded to agree — California, Florida, Maryland, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Washington are the ones named most consistently. Several other states are classified differently by different sources, and some statutes treat in-person conversations differently from phone calls.
For in-person meetings the deciding question in many statutes is whether the people speaking had a reasonable expectation of privacy — which behaves quite differently in a closed conference room than in a hotel lobby or an open-plan office. That is why the practical rule beats the legal one: say out loud that you are recording, before you press record. GetNotes is built to be recorded openly. A phone on the table is visible to everyone present, unlike a bot that appears in a participant list nobody reads.
None of this is legal advice — laws change, states are classified inconsistently, and a lot turns on the specific situation. Two habits cover most of it. Get everyone's agreement at the top of the recording itself, so the consent lives in the same file as the meeting. And check your own state's current rules, or ask counsel, before recording anything you would not be comfortable playing back to the people in the room.
Where it earns its keep
A multi-state team in one room
Your quarterly offsite has people flown in from California, Texas and New York. A widely used rule of thumb is that if anyone present is covered by an all-party state, you treat the whole conversation as all-party. Easiest fix: open the meeting by saying you are recording for minutes and give anyone the chance to object. GetNotes captures that opening statement in the transcript, so the agreement is part of the record.
Field sales and site walk-throughs
A commercial HVAC rep spends the day on rooftops and in mechanical rooms with facilities managers, capturing model numbers, access constraints and who signs off on the quote. None of that fits in a CRM field typed one-handed. Record the walk-through on a phone, upload it, and get the specifics written down with the customer's own wording preserved.
Nonprofit and municipal board meetings
A volunteer secretary takes the minutes for a school board or a homeowners association, then loses an evening writing them up. Public bodies often have to publish what was moved, who seconded and how the vote went. GetNotes turns the room's recording into a draft with named speakers and decisions listed, which the secretary edits and the board approves.
How GetNotes works
- Record or upload. Hit record on your phone or laptop in the room — or drop in an audio file you already have. No bot joins anything.
- It writes it down. Every word transcribed, every speaker labelled, in 90+ languages including ones that switch mid-sentence.
- Share the minutes.Summary, decisions, and action items with owners — ready before everyone's back at their desk.
Questions, answered
Do I need everyone's consent to record a meeting in the US?
It depends where you are. Federal wiretap law uses a one-party rule, but states including California, Florida, Maryland, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Washington expect all parties to agree, and sources disagree about several others. GetNotes cannot make that determination for you. Check your state's rules, and in practice tell everyone in the room you are recording before you start — that works everywhere.
Does GetNotes create voiceprints when it labels speakers?
Speaker diarisation in GetNotes separates a recording into distinct voices and labels them within that meeting, so you get who-said-what in the transcript and minutes. It is not a biometric identity service and it does not identify people across meetings for you. If you work in Illinois, Texas or Washington, where biometric identifiers are separately regulated, that distinction is worth knowing.
Can GetNotes replace Otter or Fireflies for my Zoom calls?
Not in the same way — GetNotes does not send a bot into a call. If most of your meetings are Zoom, Teams or Meet, a bot-based tool is the more natural fit. GetNotes is for the meetings those tools structurally cannot reach: the ones in the room. You can also record a call's audio locally and upload the file to GetNotes afterwards.
How much is GetNotes in US dollars?
Your first meeting is free — a one-time trial of up to 30 minutes with no credit card. After that, Pro is $19 per month for unlimited meetings, up to 3 hours per recording, with a fair-use cap of 25 hours of processed audio per month. That covers a heavy in-person meeting schedule. A Team plan is coming.
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