How to Use Meeting Notes in Obvious

Use Meetings to capture conversations and turn them into summaries, action items, and transcripts you can review, share, and use in project work.

Connect a calendar

Connect a calendar before you set up or start meetings. This lets Obvious show your calendar events and use the account you choose for meeting actions.

Open Settings → Connectors.
Connect the calendar account you want to use.
Complete the provider authorization flow.

If you use more than one calendar account, connect each account you want available in Meetings. You can then choose the right calendar when you set your defaults or turn on auto-join.

You can use the Obvious notetaker or connect a notetaker of your choice. In the Meetings sidebar, Add a connection offers Granola, Plaud, Fathom, Fireflies, Otter, Fellow, Read AI, and Circleback, and a connected provider syncs its meetings and transcripts into Meetings.

Set your Meeting defaults

Set your Meeting defaults before you start your first quick meeting. In Meetings, open the three-dot menu (⋯) and select Meeting defaults.

Select an Email account and Calendar.
Select an available Meeting link provider, such as Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams.
Select Save defaults.

Your defaults apply to your meeting setup in the current workspace. They do not change anyone else's settings. If you start a quick meeting before saving defaults, Obvious prompts you to set them first. You can return to the same three-dot menu later if you need to change them.

Start and join a Quick meeting

Use Quick meeting when you want to start a call now instead of scheduling one for later.

In Meetings, select the + button at the top right, then select Quick meeting.
Obvious creates a calendar event and starts the notetaker. The Obvious notetaker joins supported online meetings to record the conversation and prepare a summary, action items, and a transcript when available.
When the meeting is ready, select Join meeting to open the call.

Create a scheduled event

To schedule a meeting for later:

In Meetings, select the + button at the top right, then select New event.
Enter the event details and add attendees as needed.
Choose an available conferencing option if the event needs a meeting link. Depending on your connections, options can include Google Meet, Zoom, or Microsoft Teams.
Select Create event.

Start a meeting from a project

Projects include a dedicated Meetings section in the project sidebar. You can schedule upcoming meetings, browse what's on the calendar, and manage meetings without leaving the project.

To find it, open the project sidebar using the panel icon in the top right corner of any project view. Meetings appears as one of the sections in the sidebar. From there you can schedule a new meeting or view and manage existing ones. Any meetings you schedule or manage here use the same calendar and meeting defaults you set in Meetings.

When you add an existing meeting to a project, upcoming and completed meetings are kept separate, so you can see at a glance what is still ahead. A meeting with several attendees appears once in team and project meeting lists, not once for each attendee.

You can also start a Zoom meeting immediately from a project. Open the project's three-dot menu (⋯) and select Start meeting. Obvious creates the Zoom meeting and starts the notetaker. When the meeting is ready, select Join meeting to open the call.

Start meeting appears when Meetings is enabled and you have a Zoom account connected in Settings → Connectors. Starting from an open project uses the project name as the meeting title. It does not automatically link the meeting to the project.

If you remove a meeting from a project, it is removed from that project view only, and your calendar event is not affected.

Find a meeting with search

Meetings are searchable, so you can jump straight to any of them without browsing the calendar. Search in the sidebar matches the order of your calendar and shows upcoming meetings, so the meeting you need next is easy to spot. Meetings get a color based on their category, so you can tell different kinds of meetings apart at a glance.

Record a calendar meeting

For a calendar event with a conferencing link, you can have the Obvious notetaker record the meeting and prepare notes afterward. Open the meeting in Meetings and use the recording action available for that event.

While a meeting is being recorded, it has a persistent card in the sidebar. The card stays in place for the whole meeting, so you can see and return to a recording in progress at any time.

If you need to remove the notetaker during a call that is actively recording, select Remove notetaker from the meeting details. This action is available only for a live meeting with an active recording. It does not change future recording settings.

Automatically record meetings from selected calendars

Auto-join lets the Obvious notetaker automatically join and record eligible meetings from the calendars you select. Resulting notes are available in Meetings. Only meetings on selected calendars with a supported conferencing link are eligible for auto-join.

In Meetings, open the options menu (⋯) and select Auto-join settings.
In Auto-join Settings, turn on Auto-join meetings.
Under Calendars to auto-join, select at least one calendar.
Save your settings.

Leave auto-join off, or change your calendar selection, when you do not want meetings from a calendar prepared for recording automatically.

After a recorded meeting has been processed, open it in Meetings. Its details can include:

Actions when the meeting has action items to review.
Summary for a concise record of the meeting.
Transcript when a transcript is available.
Info for meeting details.

Not every section is ready immediately after a meeting ends. Wait for processing to finish before expecting completed notes.

You can work through meeting action items with bulk actions on the tasks page, accept or decline a task from its context menu, and respond to approval cards inline in the Actions tab.

When you revise a meeting proposal, you can @ mention teammates to tell Obvious who you mean, so it can assign or route the work to them.

If you work with meeting notes from outside Obvious, paste in the transcript or summary and select Detect details. Obvious detects the title, the participants (matched to people in your workspace where possible), and the date with start and end times, and you can adjust any of them before adding the notes.

When meeting notes are ready to share, open the meeting options and select Share. In Share Meeting, use Link to create a public link, or use Send to send the notes. Anyone with a public link can view the meeting notes. A public meeting page can also offer Add to Calendar.

To share completed summaries without opening each meeting, turn on Auto-share summaries from the Meetings options. Turn the setting off when you no longer want future summaries shared automatically.

A completed meeting can also become project context. After processing, open the meeting options and select Create project from meeting or Add to existing project. You can choose the processed material to include: Summary, Action items, Decisions, Open questions, and an optional Transcript. When you add a meeting to a project, you can link just that meeting or the entire series, and once it is linked, its notes, actions, and decisions file into the project automatically. Artifacts created from a meeting save under the project's Meetings folder, grouped by meeting owner, and saving stays reliable throughout a meeting. The agent can then help you follow through on decisions or action items.

You can also ask the agent to find completed meetings and work with their notes. For example:

Summarize the decisions from my planning meeting last week.

Find the action items from yesterday's customer call.

Meetings