Manual Meetings
How meeting detection works
What makes the take-notes prompt appear, why it sometimes doesn't, and how to turn it off.
Neato Echo watches for the start of a meeting and offers to take notes. It's on by default. Nothing is recorded until you accept the prompt.
What actually triggers the prompt
Two things:
| Signal | What it is |
|---|---|
| Sustained microphone activity | You've been talking for long enough that it looks like a call rather than a stray noise. This is what catches browser meetings — Google Meet, or anything running in a tab |
| A calendar event | If you've connected a Google or Microsoft calendar, an event with a start time coming up produces a prompt shortly before it begins |
Both land in the same place, so overlapping signals give you one prompt rather than several.
When the prompt says different things
The wording follows what Neato Echo knows:
- "It sounds like you're in a meeting." — detected from your microphone
- "Your meeting is starting." — a calendar event about to begin
- "It sounds like your meeting is underway." — a calendar event already in progress
When the event carries a meeting link, the button becomes Join & transcribe and opens the call for you.
When it stays quiet on purpose
The prompt is suppressed when it would be unwelcome or redundant:
- You're already recording a meeting
- You're mid-dictation — the prompt waits rather than interrupting you, and arrives once you've finished
- There's a short cool-down after you finish a recording, so ending one call doesn't immediately prompt you about the same audio
- You already dismissed that particular detection
Turning it off
Open Settings, then Preferences, and find Notifications. Two separate switches:
| Setting | Controls |
|---|---|
| Meeting detection | The prompt triggered by microphone activity |
| Calendar reminders | The prompt triggered by an upcoming calendar event |
They're independent, so you can keep calendar reminders and drop the microphone prompts, or the reverse. Disable all notifications in the same group silences both — along with everything else except error messages.
Switching the prompt off doesn't remove the feature — you can still start a meeting note whenever you like with the Meeting Mode Hotkey.
If you never get a prompt
Work through these in order:
- Check the switches above. Both are on by default, but they're the first thing to rule out.
- Talk for a bit longer. Microphone detection waits for sustained audio deliberately — a one-line "can you hear me?" may not be enough.
- Check your microphone is the one being used. If Neato Echo is listening to a device you aren't speaking into, it hears nothing. See choose your microphone.
- Connect your calendar if your meetings are scheduled. Calendar events don't depend on hearing anything at all, which makes them the most reliable trigger — see connect Google or Microsoft calendar.
- Close apps that hold your microphone open all the time — see the next section, which is the cause people miss most often.
If it still never fires, start the note by hand with the Meeting Mode Hotkey and tell us — that's a bug worth hearing about.
An app that never lets go of the microphone
Microphone detection works by noticing the microphone go from idle to in use — that change is what says "a call just started." A few kinds of program hold the microphone open the entire time they are running, so from Neato Echo's point of view the microphone is never idle, the change never happens, and the prompt never appears.
Programs that commonly do this:
- Voice changers (for example MorphVOX) and virtual-microphone tools
- Streaming and recording software (for example OBS) while it is live or armed
- Some "AI meeting assistant" or transcription apps that listen continuously
- Audio routing utilities (for example VoiceMeeter) that keep a capture open
How to tell if this is your problem: close the suspect app completely (quit it, don't just minimize it — check the system tray by the clock and quit it there too), then start a call and talk for a few seconds. If the prompt now appears, that app was holding the microphone.
What to do about it:
- If you don't need the app during meetings, quit it before your call.
- If you do need it (a voice changer you always use, say), you don't have to give it up — just start the note by hand with the Meeting Mode Hotkey (Ctrl + Alt + M by default) instead of waiting for the automatic prompt. Connecting your calendar also sidesteps it entirely, because calendar prompts don't depend on the microphone at all.
A future update improves this so a new call is noticed even while another app is holding the microphone, but starting by hand or using the calendar always works today.
Related
Still need help?
Write to [email protected] with your Windows version, your Neato Echo version (Settings → System), and what you were doing. A person reads every message.