Wearable recorders vs meeting bots
Look at last week. Two scheduled video calls with the client's team. An hour at their site, half of it walking. Ten minutes in a corridor with the person who actually signs things, which turned out to be the ten minutes that mattered. A call that began as a quick question about an invoice and ended with a change to the scope. And a forty-minute drive back, spent talking through all of it with a colleague.
People shopping in this category usually start by asking which tool is better. That question cannot be answered, because the two things most often compared are not built to reach the same conversations. The question that can be answered is where your week happens.
Two machines, two different jobs
A meeting bot is software that joins a scheduled call as a participant and records it. What it is good at is genuinely good, and it is worth stating properly before anything else: it turns up. It does not need you to remember anything, it does not need you to be there, and it does not need the day to go to plan. If the conversation is a booked call, a bot will have it, every time, including the week you were ill and the call went ahead without you. Nothing else in this comparison can do that. It also announces itself — it appears in the participant list, so the client can see that a record is being made without anybody having to say a sentence about it.
A wearable or table recorder is a device you have with you that captures the room when you start it: a phone, a small recorder, a pen lying on the table between you. What it is good at is the opposite half of the week. It does not care whether a conversation was booked, whether it happened on a link, or whether anybody's calendar knows it occurred. It gets the site visit, the corridor, the ten minutes in the car park afterwards. And it is an object people can see, which puts the recording in the room rather than in a settings page somewhere.
Both of them end up in the same place. An hour of audio becomes text you can read and a summary short enough to send, and the route it took to get there stops mattering the moment it arrives.
What each one can reach
Set the categories out with the two things that actually separate them: the conversations each can get to at all, and what it asks of you on the day. Almost everything else people argue about downstream comes from these two columns.
| Where the capture comes from | Which conversations it reaches | What it needs from you on the day |
|---|---|---|
| Software that joins a scheduled call | Anything with a calendar entry and a link, whether or not you attend it | Nothing at all. That is the whole proposition and it is a real one |
| A recorder in the room — a phone, a pen on the table, something you carry | Any conversation you are present for, booked or not, on a link or not | That you start it, and that you say out loud you have |
| The voice recorder already on your phone | The same conversations as the row above, for nothing, with no second device to buy, charge or pair | The same, plus naming the file and deciding where it lives before you forget both |
| A person writing it down | Whatever they sit in, which is usually the meetings important enough to staff | Their attention, which the conversation was also trying to use |
Read the middle column, then go through next week honestly. If almost everything you would be sorry to lose has a calendar entry against it, this is a short decision and the first row makes it for you. If a third of it does not — because you visit people, or because your best conversations start when a call ends — then the first row covers two thirds of your week and is silent about the rest, and no amount of quality inside that row changes the arithmetic.
Plenty of client teams run both, and that is not a fudge. A bot on the standing Thursday call and something in your pocket for the site visits is two answers to two questions, and it is a more honest arrangement than picking one and quietly deciding the other half of the week does not count.
The part that involves other people
Capture is not only a technical choice in client work, because a client is on the other end of it. The two categories put the awkward moment in different places rather than removing it, and it is worth knowing which moment you are choosing.
Something that joins a call tells the room by existing. Everyone sees it in the list, nobody has to be brave, and the notice arrives the same way every time. The cost of that is that it arrives as an item in a list rather than as a person asking, and the first a client's legal team hears of it may be a name they do not recognise sitting in a meeting with four of their staff.
A recorder in the room is the reverse. Nothing announces it, so you have to, which is a sentence some people find harder than they expect. What you get for it is that the agreement is made by two people looking at each other, and it can be withdrawn the same way, halfway through, without anybody filing anything.
Where Ona sits, and what the row costs
Ona is in the second row. You start it yourself — the phone in your pocket, the web app while the call is running, and for the rooms where neither of those is right, the Ona RecordPen, a Bluetooth pen you put on the table — and no software of ours attends a meeting in your place. What lands afterwards is what Meeting Notes makes of any recording: the words as spoken, a summary the length the conversation deserved, and the commitments lifted out of it.
So the cost of that row is ours to carry, and it is the one written in the table. Ona captures nothing you did not start. A call you forgot is not thinly recorded; it is absent. A meeting that went ahead without you produces nothing whatever, and if a real part of what you need back happens in rooms you are not in, this is not the category to shop in and nothing further down this page fixes that.
What you get in exchange is that nothing exists by accident. Every conversation in the account is one a person decided to record, which is a different sort of archive to hold and a different sort to be answerable for. Those two sentences are one fact read from opposite ends, and you do not get to choose which end you are buying.
Sorting the week instead of the tools
The way to get this decision right is to stop reading about capture and spend ten minutes on your own calendar, which is the only document that knows the answer.
Ten minutes with next week
- Mark every conversation by where it happensA link, a room, or neither. That third pile — the drive, the corridor, the stand at an exhibition — is the one people leave off the list, and it is usually where the awkward information lives.
- Count the ones with no calendar entryWrite the number down before you interpret it. Two out of fifteen and the scheduled-call category is your whole answer. Six out of fifteen and it is a component of the answer, which is a different purchase.
- Set one default per kind, not per meetingDecide once that standing account calls are captured one way and site visits another. A rule you apply without thinking survives a busy Tuesday; a judgement you make fifteen times a week does not.
- Find out what the client's side permitsBefore the visit, not in the doorway. Larger organisations usually have a written answer and it is usually easy to get. It is also the cheapest thing on this list to skip and the most expensive one to have skipped.
- Decide now what happens when nothing was capturedIt will happen. Have a habit waiting for it: three lines written from memory within the hour, while the memory is still worth writing down. A weak record made the same day beats a perfect one nobody has.
About a third of what I need later gets said standing up. I stopped trying to find one thing that covers all of it and gave the standing calls and the site visits separate answers, which took an afternoon to set up and has not needed thinking about since.
Sanne V., Senior Account Manager, packaging manufacturer
What happens to all of it afterwards — the recap, the thing you send, the question somebody asks about a promise made in April — is a separate subject, and it is the one taken up by Ona for client-facing professionals.
What neither of them fixes
Both categories capture what was said. In most client relationships the expensive problem is not that the words were lost; it is that the client had not decided yet, and there is no recording to be had of a decision nobody has made.
A recorded client conversation also outlives the deal it belonged to. It is a record of a relationship, it will still be there when the account manager changes and when the relationship goes wrong, and where it is kept and who can open it are questions worth answering while you have four of them rather than four hundred.
Capture is the cheap half, too. Choosing a surface settles where the material comes from and nothing at all about what you then do with it — the thing you send, the answer you did not get and had to chase, the account that has gone quiet since March. The hour after the conversation is where the value in any of this turns up, and neither row reaches into that hour.
And a project is bigger than its conversations. The portal, the change request, the email chain where the date really moved: none of that is audio, none of it is in either row, and treating a stack of recordings as the account's whole history is a way of being precisely wrong about it.
When the room is half remote
There is no clean answer to a hybrid room and anybody who gives you one is selling something. What works is choosing the side the important half is on, and saying at the start which side you have covered.
That second part matters more than the first. A team that believes the whole meeting was captured, when half of it was, will stop taking notes and then be surprised in three weeks.
Then a record exists and it is theirs. That is fine for the call and no use to you afterwards, because you cannot put a question to somebody else's archive next March, and you will not be told when it is deleted.
If the conversation matters to your side, make your own record of it and say that you are. Two records of one call is not rude; a quiet one is.
No, and the people who try give up inside a month. The ones worth catching are the conversations you would otherwise have to ring somebody up to reconstruct.
In practice that is two or three a week. A client's whole account history is rarely more than a couple of hundred minutes a year.
Pick the surface before the meeting
Take next week's client conversations, mark the ones with no calendar entry against them, and decide today what captures those.