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Five things Notetaker now does so you don’t have to

Five things Notetaker now does so you don’t have to

• 6 min read
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Author: Nick Barraclough
Nick Barraclough
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Deduplication, pause dispatch, retention windows, recording notices, and branded avatars. Set them once, change them for any customer.

Today we’re introducing a huge update to Notetaker, with several new features and a new way to set up Notetaker.

Every team that scales a meeting recording integration ends up writing the same things themselves: logic to catch duplicate bots, a way to enforce usage limitations, and retention policies to limit how long data is stored with a 3rd party.

Configurations take on that work for you, and they unlock five new features too:

  • Deduplication. Send only one Notetaker when several people from the same organization are in the same meeting.
  • Custom announcements. Have Notetaker introduce itself in the meeting chat, and send reminders when late participants join.
  • Custom avatars. Give your Notetaker a custom image for personalized branding.
  • Pause dispatch. Stop sending Notetakers for a customer who has used up their recording limits, and automatically resume in the next month.
  • Retention. Set how long recordings are stored in Nylas, per customer.

One Notetaker per meeting

Four people from the same account accept the same invite. Until now, that sent four Notetakers: four recordings of one conversation, four hours billed, and four sets of media for your app to reconcile.

Turn on deduplication, and that group gets one Notetaker between them. Two different customers on the same call still get one each, since neither should end up holding the other’s recording.

You can switch it off further down when someone needs their own copy, so the executive whose board meeting shouldn’t circulate keeps a Notetaker while everyone else is deduplicated.

Customize & personalize your Notetakers

Custom announcements. Notetaker can post messages into the meeting chat when it joins and when someone arrives after it. You write the text, so it can introduce itself and follow up with a reminder that the call is being recorded. When several people arrive late in a row, a debounce window collapses them into one mesƒsage instead of one per arrival, so a ten-person all-hands doesn’t get ten notices. For customers selling into healthcare, financial services, and legal, an in-call recording notice is often something their compliance team requires.

Custom avatars. Notetaker used to join as a blank tile with a name on it. Upload an image, and it joins showing that instead, on the one part of the integration every person in the meeting looks at.

Pause dispatch when the hours run out

Applications building Notetaker functionality often set usage-based limits, so that customers don’t go wild with recording too many hours. A customer on your 100-hour plan may use it up before the end of the month, leaving two weeks of meetings still booked.

Now you can set dispatch_disabled_until, and Nylas stops dispatching Notetakers for that customer until that timestamp passes. Your calendar rules stay exactly as they are, so nothing needs rebuilding, and future Notetakers continue being scheduled. When the date arrives, dispatch resumes on its own and your new month’s quota starts getting used.

You can pause a single user, a workspace, or your whole application.

Retention policies

 Nylas Notetaker stores recordings and transcripts for 14 days so that your application can retrieve them. Now you set that retention period per customer, so the one whose security team asked for seven days gets seven. You can also hand it over for their control in your app: their IT admin could set a retention policy inside your settings page and your app writes it to their Configuration.

How configurations work

A configuration is a saved set of defaults. You write it once, and Notetaker reads it when it’s time to join a meeting. Set one for your whole application as a global default, and give your customers their own Configurations when they want something different, like a different avatar or name

Nylas reads the most specific configuration available and falls back for anything you haven’t set. So you can turn on recording and summaries across your app, give one customer a seven-day retention window, and give one of their teams a different display name, without any of those decisions colliding.

Settings are read when the Notetaker joins, not when you schedule it. Update a configuration this afternoon and every Notetaker already booked for tomorrow joins with the new values, so changing something for a customer is one API call rather than having to iterate over everything they have scheduled.

curl --request POST \
  --url 'https://api.us.nylas.com/v3/notetakers/configs' \
  --header 'Authorization: Bearer <NYLAS_API_KEY>' \
  --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  --data '{
    "display_name": "Company defaults",
    "notetaker_settings": {
      "name": "Acme Notetaker",
      "recording_type": "audio_video",
      "transcription": true,
      "summary": true,
      "retention_time": 604800,
      "messages": {
        "on_join": [
          {
            "type": "text",
            "content": "Acme Notetaker is recording and transcribing this meeting.",
            "send_after_ms": 3000
          }
        ]
      }
    },
    "deduplication_policy": "active"
  }'

Configurations are optional. If you’d rather keep passing settings on each request, that works exactly as it does today.

What teams are building with it

Sales platforms. Each account gets a recording quota. The app pauses dispatch when a customer reaches it and lifts the pause when the month turns over. Deduplication means multiple reps joining the same call only generates one recording.

Applicant tracking systems. Notetaker joins under the hiring team’s brand and announces itself to the candidate. Retention is set per client, so the agency handling regulated placements keeps interviews longer than the one that doesn’t.

Healthcare and financial software. The recording notice happens in the call and is repeated when late joiners arrive, and retention matches what each customer’s compliance team signed off on, configured inside your product.

Customer success tools. Deduplication keeps a five-person QBR from producing five recordings, and the custom avatar represents their brand rather than an anonymous recording bot

Already building on Notetaker?

One change to your requests, and it’s smaller than it sounds.

The top-level name and the meeting_settings object move into a single notetaker_settings object. The field names inside are identical, so it’s a swap rather than a rewrite. Your webhook handling doesn’t change. Legacy requests keep working while you get to it.

The migration page has the before and after for every endpoint. Copy it as markdown, hand it to your coding agent, and let it do the pass. That’s how we migrated our own internal app, and it took less than an afternoon.

Built for production

Notetaker runs on the infrastructure Nylas has been operating for more than a decade, across thousands of production applications. Nylas has completed a SOC 2 Type II examination, maintains ISO 27001 and ISO 27701 certifications, and undergoes independent HIPAA assessments. The platform’s security and privacy controls help customers support their obligations under GDPR and CCPA/CPRA.

Get started

Configurations and all five features are live on every Nylas application today.

Create a free Sandbox account and build the whole thing before you pay for anything. Already have an account? Sign in and start with the configurations guide.

Full docs: deduplication, pause dispatch, retention, custom announcements, and custom video output.