notion wants your meeting notes

Notion shipped custom instructions for AI Meeting Notes on March 18th. Plus a background operation mode — it runs without you having to keep the app in focus.

This is significant if you’re building in the meeting transcription space. Which I am.

Here’s what Notion has that I don’t: distribution. Millions of users already in the app. An established workspace where notes live alongside everything else. Brand trust. A sales team. Integrations with every tool people already use. An 800-pound gorilla’s worth of resources.

Here’s what I have that Notion doesn’t: your audio never leaves your machine.

That’s the bet. That’s the entire bet.

Notion’s meeting notes are cloud-processed. Your meeting audio goes to their servers, gets transcribed, gets summarized, comes back. For a lot of people, that’s fine. For a lot of use cases — internal standups, project check-ins, brainstorming sessions — nobody cares.

But there’s a category of meeting where it matters. Legal conversations. Medical discussions. HR one-on-ones. Board meetings. Any conversation where the content is sensitive enough that sending raw audio to a third party is a risk you’d rather not take. Or where compliance says you can’t.

That’s Transcripted’s lane. Not “better than Notion at meeting notes.” That’s a fight I lose on distribution alone. The lane is: meeting transcription for people who need their audio to stay local. Period.

The custom instructions feature is actually the more interesting part of Notion’s update. It means users can tell Notion’s AI how to format their notes, what to focus on, what to ignore. That’s personalization at the intelligence layer. It’s good product thinking. And it’s something Transcripted should be thinking about too — not because Notion did it, but because the underlying insight is right. Generic meeting summaries aren’t that useful. Personalized ones are.

The background mode is table stakes. Every meeting app needs to run without being in focus. Transcripted already does this with the floating pill.

So what’s the actual red bar here?

The red bar is that Notion entering the space compresses the timeline. Every casual user who might have tried a standalone meeting transcription app now has one built into their existing workspace. The addressable market for “yet another meeting notes app” just got smaller. What’s left is the wedge: privacy, local-first, no cloud dependency.

That wedge is real. But it’s narrower than “meeting transcription for everyone.”

I need to be honest about that.