Why Telmi has no meeting bot
Most meeting tools join your call as an extra participant. Telmi listens from your computer instead. Here's why we built it that way, and what it costs us.
By Suraaj Samanta · 4 min read
A lot of meeting tools work by sending a bot into your call. It shows up in the participant list with a name like "Notetaker", records, and sends notes afterward. It works. We chose not to do it.
The call is about them, not your tools
Telmi is built for the person on the call: a founder doing their own sales calls, a rep running discovery, someone in an interview. On those calls, the first minute matters. A bot in the participant list changes the first minute. People ask what it is. Some ask you to remove it. Some just get a little more careful about what they say.
You should still tell people you're taking notes. That's the law in many places and it's the decent thing to do. But a sentence from you lands differently than a stranger in the grid.
Live help needs to be fast, and local
A bot hears the call on someone else's server, then has to get suggestions back to you. Telmi is on your computer, hearing exactly what you hear. On a Mac, speech is transcribed on the device, so the question is text within moments of being spoken. That's what makes it possible to show an answer before they've finished asking.
It works with every call app
Because Telmi listens to your microphone and your computer's audio, it doesn't care which app the call is in. Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, Slack huddles, FaceTime, a browser tab. No integrations, no calendar invites to the bot, no admin approval for a new app in your Zoom account.
Your calls stay with you
On a Mac, audio never leaves your computer. Your transcripts and notes are saved as files on your computer, not on our servers. Text excerpts do go to the AI to write suggestions and notes. We're clear about that in our privacy guide.
What it costs us
Being honest about the trade-offs:
- Telmi has to be running on your computer during the call. If you take a call on your phone, it can't hear it.
- We hear the other side as one voice, "Them". Telmi can show attendee names from your calendar, but it doesn't separate every speaker the way a bot with per-person audio streams can.
- If you use speakers instead of headphones, your mic hears the call too. Telmi removes most of that echo; headphones remove all of it.
- Telmi is for your own calls. It isn't built to record a whole team's calls for a manager to review. That's a different product.
For the person taking the call, we think those are the right trade-offs. You get help while it can still change the conversation, and the people you talk to only meet you.