The double-booking wasn’t her fault, for once. One client moved their weekly sync; the other confirmed a kickoff she’d proposed three weeks earlier. Both landed at 2pm on Tuesday, one on Zoom, one on Teams. Two clients, two platforms, one consultant.
The usual options are all bad. Reschedule, and one client hears “you’re not the priority.” Split attention across two tabs and take notes in neither. Or send a notetaker bot, the little robot participant that joins the call, announces itself, and sits in the corner of everyone’s screen like a court stenographer. Maya works with clients who negotiate acquisitions. A bot in the room changes what people are willing to say.
So she did the thing that still feels slightly illegal the first time: she took both calls.
One click per meeting. No participants added.
Paredra Sync lives in the Mac menu bar. When a meeting app starts playing audio, it shows up in the deck as a source: Zoom, Teams, Safari, or just the microphone. Maya clicked Record on Zoom, joined her sync, then clicked Record on Teams and joined the kickoff on her second screen.
Nothing joined either call. No bot, no “Maya’s Notetaker has entered the meeting,” no third face in the gallery. Paredra captures the meeting audio directly from the app, on the device. And the transcription happens on her Mac too; the audio never leaves it. For a consultant whose calls are covered by three different NDAs, that’s not a feature. It’s the precondition.
She spent most of her attention on the kickoff, where she was presenting. The sync mostly needed her ears; she dropped in twice to answer questions. Both transcripts ran live the whole time, side by side in the deck, each labeled with its own meeting.
2:34pm: both meetings end. Both notes exist.
When the calls ended, the deck offered notes for each, separately and correctly attributed. The kickoff became a structured note: a TL;DR, the action items she’d agreed to, the topics covered. The sync became its own note, filed to the other client. No untangling, no “wait, which call was that decision from?”
That evening she opened the day’s notes from her phone. Both meetings’ action items were there, each anchored to the moment it was agreed. Tap one, and it plays the seconds of audio where she said yes.
Why nobody else does this
Bot-based notetakers can’t, structurally. A bot is a participant; it can be in one meeting per identity, it announces itself, and it needs an invite. Capturing from the apps themselves means Paredra isn’t in the meeting at all. It’s beside you, which is the point of the name. Two meetings at once is just what happens naturally when capture is a property of your device instead of a guest in the room.
Maya still tries not to double-book. But the calendar does what calendars do. And now, when Tuesday goes wrong at 2pm, both conversations make it into her memory anyway.
A note on consent: record meetings the way you’d want to be recorded: tell people, and check the recording rules where you and your participants live. Paredra transcribes meeting audio on your own device (it never leaves it), and we never train models on your content.