Record a Note
Start, stop, and monitor a recording from the dock, and keep capturing while your device is locked or in the background.
Recording lives in the dock at the bottom of a note. Open a note, hit record, talk.
The Dock
Three controls, left to right:
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| Waveform button | Starts recording. |
| Stop (red square) | Ends the recording. |
| Chevron | Shows and hides the transcript panel. |
The dock only appears on a note. From anywhere else you'll see New note instead — make a note first, then record into it.
Starting and Stopping
Click the waveform button. The first time on a new device, your operating system or browser asks for microphone access.
The bars animate while a recording is running, so you can tell at a glance that it's live. There's no pause — stop when you're done.
Stopping isn't the end of the note. You can record into the same note again later, as many times as you like, and each recording keeps its own transcript.
If something goes wrong you'll see it above the dock: Microphone access was denied, A recording is already in progress, or Could not start recording. Troubleshooting covers what to do about each.
Several Recordings, One Note
Every click of the record button starts a new recording attached to the current note. That's the mechanism behind a lot of useful patterns:
- Record the meeting, then record your own thoughts right after it. Two recordings, one note.
- A recurring sync can be one note that grows week over week.
- Step out of a call and come back — stop, then start again. Nothing is lost.
The transcript panel groups them under Recording 1, Recording 2, and so on, with the time each started. You can fold them into the note one at a time — see Enhance.
Navigating to a different note stops the recording. Prismical records into the note you're on, so leaving ends the session.
What Gets Captured
You don't pick this — Prismical takes the most it can on the platform you're using.
Your microphone and system audio together, on macOS 14.2 or later — so a video call is captured from both ends. See System audio.
On older macOS, recording works but captures your microphone only.
Your microphone.
Your microphone, through the browser's mic permission.
Your microphone. Recording continues when you leave the app or lock the phone.
Your microphone. Recording continues when you leave the app or lock the phone.
Prismical always uses your system's default input device. To record from a different microphone, change your default in your operating system's sound settings before you start.
If Something Interrupts It
On the desktop app, audio is written to a file on your machine as it's captured, before anything is sent anywhere. So a crash, a force-quit, or a dead battery doesn't lose the recording — Prismical picks it up and transcribes it the next time you open the app.
The same applies to your connection. Losing wifi mid-meeting doesn't stop the recording; the audio waits on disk and sends when you're back. If it still can't get through after several tries it stops retrying, and the file stays on your machine rather than being thrown away.
In the browser, a recording only exists in the tab. Closing it, reloading, or a browser crash loses the recording — there's no file on disk to recover from. For anything you can't afford to lose, use the desktop app.
Where the Audio Goes
Your audio is never stored in Prismical's cloud. It's sent in short chunks, transcribed in memory, and dropped. Only the transcript is kept.
On desktop and mobile, the audio does sit in a working file on your own device while it's being captured and sent. Once it's transcribed successfully, that file is deleted. If transcription never succeeds, the file is kept rather than discarded — so a recording that failed to upload is still on your machine.
See Security & privacy for the full picture.