SMF·TACTIQ
Can a prompt replace Tactiq?
Meeting notes — meeting transcription and AI notes
Exhibit tracking slip
Verdict
Tactiq's trick is that it never records audio: it reads the caption text the meeting platform is already rendering on screen, which sidesteps recording consent, transcription cost and audio quality in one move. Rebuilding that means a browser extension watching a DOM you do not control, deduplicating captions that re-render as they are corrected, and repairing it every time Google ships a redesign. Clever, genuinely useful, and a fortnight rather than an evening.
Exhibit A — The prompt
Received on31.07.2026Build a browser extension that captures live meeting captions and turns them into notes. It must never record audio.
Capture: a content script that activates on the meeting platform's own domain and finds the caption container. Attach a MutationObserver to it. Caption panels do not append clean lines — they re-render the current utterance repeatedly as the recogniser corrects itself, then finalise it. Handle this explicitly: keep the current in-flight utterance per speaker keyed by the caption element's identity, replace it on each mutation, and only commit it to the transcript when it stops changing for a short debounce window or the element is removed. Deduplicating naively by string comparison produces a transcript full of half-sentences, and this is the single hardest part of the build.
Speaker attribution: read the speaker label the caption panel provides. Where it provides none, mark the segment as unattributed rather than guessing.
Selector resilience: keep every DOM selector in one configuration object with a version and a last-verified date, not scattered through the code. Detect a capture failure — observer attached, no captions for a long stretch of an active meeting — and surface a visible warning in the extension rather than producing a silently empty transcript. Say in the README that these selectors will break and that this file is where to fix them.
Session handling: start capture when the user clicks record in the extension, show a persistent indicator while it is running, and stop on click or when the meeting page closes. Never start automatically.
Storage: transcripts in the extension's local storage, exported to a local SQLite-backed companion or downloaded as files. Each transcript keeps the meeting title, date, duration and full timestamped segments.
Notes: on demand, send the transcript to Anthropic or OpenAI, whichever key the user configured, and produce a summary, decisions, open questions and action items with owners where named. Never send automatically; the user presses a button after reading the transcript.
Out of scope: recording audio or video, joining meetings as a bot, real-time note generation during the call, and any hosted backend or account. Note in the README that participants should be told captions are being captured, and that the tool captures only what the platform is already displaying to everyone in the room.
Opening prefills the prompt — press enter to run it.
Exhibit B — What you lose
- B.1 captions in languages the meeting platform does not offer them in
- B.2 anything said while captions are switched off
- B.3 the integrations that push notes into Notion, Slack and a CRM
- B.4 shared team transcripts and search across a whole workspace
Prior art
Exhibit C — Why people still pay: capture reliability, integrations, and collaboration
Because the extension breaks. Meeting platforms restructure their interfaces without notice, and a captured transcript that silently stops working mid-quarter costs more than the subscription ever did.
Questions
Can I import my Tactiq transcripts?
Yes. Tactiq exports transcripts as text and Markdown, which import as read-only records with their timestamps intact. Generated notes come across as text too, though they will not match the format of anything generated afterwards.
Why capture captions instead of recording audio?
Three reasons, and they are the whole design. No microphone permission, so no recording indicator and no consent question about a recording. No transcription cost, because the platform already did it. And it works on a meeting you joined from a locked-down laptop where you cannot install a recorder.
What does it cost to run?
Nothing to capture, since the captions are free and everything is local. Only the notes step costs anything, at a few cents per hour-long transcript. This is one of the cheapest tools in the category to run yourself.
What is the one thing that does not survive the rebuild?
Staying working. Tactiq employs people whose job is repairing the capture the week after a platform redesign. Your extension breaks on a Tuesday, silently, and you find out when you open a transcript that stops halfway through an important call.
Related tools
Receipt