Fieldnotes Blog https://fieldnotes.fm/blog/ Writing from the people behind Fieldnotes — a one-time-pay, on-device meeting recorder for Mac. en-us Sun, 05 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 hand-rolled Speaker labels are the feature https://fieldnotes.fm/blog/speaker-labels-are-the-feature/ https://fieldnotes.fm/blog/speaker-labels-are-the-feature/ Sat, 05 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000 hi@fieldnotes.fm (Ryan Troxler) Turning speech into text is close to solved. Knowing who said what is the hard part — and it's what turns a recording into notes you can search and act on. Here are two transcripts of the same meeting.

The first one is a wall of text. Forty minutes of conversation, punctuation, the occasional "yeah, exactly" — all of it true, none of it useful. You can read it. You can't use it.

The second one has names on it. Jeff said the vendor deadline was soft. Bob disagreed. You committed to sending the revised numbers by Friday. Same forty minutes, same words — but now it's a record you can act on. That second transcript is the whole product.

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]]> Hand your meeting notes to Claude https://fieldnotes.fm/blog/hand-your-notes-to-claude/ https://fieldnotes.fm/blog/hand-your-notes-to-claude/ Sun, 07 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000 hi@fieldnotes.fm (Ryan Troxler) A walkthrough of the process-fieldnotes skill: summarize meetings, recap across weeks, search transcripts, and draft follow-ups in Cowork or Claude Code. Most meeting tools end at the summary. You leave a call, the tool spits out three bullets and an action-item list, and that's the product.

Fieldnotes ends at the transcript. On purpose. A speaker-labeled transcript with timestamps is the source of truth — the offhand commitment, the disagreement that mattered, the actual moment somebody changed their mind.

The bet I made when I built Fieldnotes: most of you already pay for a real AI. You don't need a second subscription to summarize your meetings. Hand the transcripts to the agent you already have.

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]]> Why Fieldnotes exists https://fieldnotes.fm/blog/why-fieldnotes-exists/ https://fieldnotes.fm/blog/why-fieldnotes-exists/ Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 hi@fieldnotes.fm (Ryan Troxler) Why I built a one-time-pay, on-device meeting recorder for Mac instead of using Granola or Otter. I built Fieldnotes because I kept losing things in meetings. The meetings themselves were fine — you sit through them, you survive. What kept going missing was the stuff that mattered: the offhand commitment somebody made, the actual decision, the reason we agreed not to do the obvious thing.

I'd walk out of a 45-minute call with three bullet points and a sense I'd missed two more. A week later somebody would email me asking what we'd decided, and I'd open my notes and find a question mark. Or worse, a confident summary I'd written that turned out to be wrong.

If you spend any real time in meetings you probably know the feeling. You can't take good notes and pay real attention at the same time, and the more meetings you have the worse your notes get. It feeds itself.

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