What is AI real-time note taking?

Ask most AI note takers what they do and the answer is always the same. They "listen", the call ends, and a document or summary turns up. The notes are something that happens afterwards, to a meeting that already finished. This isn't note taking. It's a Large Language Model (LLM) wrapped around a recorder. And instead of playing your meeting back, you read it back. So really, not much has changed.

Real-time note taking is what the name implies: everything happens whilst you're still on the call. The record gets built while the conversation is still going, so that by the time you hang up it's already there.

That sounds like a difference in timing and isn't. A summary written afterwards is a reconstruction: it works from what was recorded, and you find out what it missed once the moment to fix it has gone. A note written during the call is a record you were present for. You watch it land, and you can correct it while the person who said the thing is still on the line.

In Sorinai most of this was already true. Your template fills itself in as the answers come up, and Quick Tidy cleans up rough lines while you keep typing. What was missing was the plainest part of it — asking for a line, and having it written.

Tell Sorinai what you want

Here's the moment it's for. Someone gives you information you needed, halfway through a sentence about something else.

You get two bad options. Type it and lose the next ten seconds of the conversation, or trust that your "notetaker" recorded it and you can come back to it later.

Now there's a third option. Tell Sorinai, and it writes it down.

"That was important, write that down."

"Add what she just said about the budget."

"These figures seem important, note them down."

"Delete the last line, I got the number wrong."

It's in the room with you — it sees what you see and hears what you hear — so you don't have to repeat anything back to it. "What she just said" or "what's on the screen" is enough.

It writes directly into the notepad you're already typing in, not a panel beside it and not a summary that turns up once the call is over. The line lands where it belongs and you never leave the conversation to put it there. Empty notepad and it starts you off; half-written and it slots into the right place. Everything you didn't mention stays exactly as it was. Almost like a partner sitting next to you.

It writes when you ask, and not otherwise

This is the part of real-time note taking that should give you pause. Write access to your own notes isn't something to hand over casually, so here is exactly what it has.

• Only when you ask it to. If you don't explicitly ask for something to be written, it has no way to reach your notes. Nothing gets written on your behalf while you're busy.
• Only what you asked for. It changes the part your instruction names and leaves the rest untouched, with nothing else re-worded or re-ordered on the way past.
• Not over the top of you. Keep typing while it works. If you happen to be editing the same line at that moment, yours wins and its change is dropped.
• Never silently. Every line it writes sweeps in colour as it lands, and you can choose to keep or undo its edits. Undo takes back the whole thing, not just the last bit of it.

It holds the pen when you hand it over. It never picks it up.

What ends up in your notes

Anything the copilot writes goes in as though you'd typed it, because as far as your notes are concerned, you did. It's your line, in your notepad, and you can change it like any other.

And you can continue chatting to Sorinai after your meeting has finished: tidy up something, clarify certain points from your conversation. It retains full memory of what just happened.

Live now

It's there in your next call, once you're on the latest version. Mac and Windows both.

Most of this category is racing to write your notes for you. We'd rather build the notepad that writes down what you asked for and then gets out of the way. Deciding what was worth keeping is the part you're good at, and it needs you still listening.