Every meeting, kept the way you want it.

A meeting can reach your vault four ways, and which one fits depends on where you meet, your plan, whether you want the words or the whole recording — and whether you already have a recording of your own. The cheapest path that can actually deliver is always the one to prefer — so here it is as a short decision, not a manual.

Start with where the meeting happens, then what you want out of it. Each path ends with what to connect — and 1Presence works the rest out from there.

Two forks shape every answer above. The first is what you want: just the transcript, or the full recording. A transcript can often come for free, because your meeting tool already wrote one and 1Presence simply reads it. A recording is different — the only reliable way to land the video file in your vault is to have 1Presence's recorder in the call, so video is always the metered path.

The second is whether a transcript even exists to read. Google Meet and Microsoft Teams make their own — but only on the right plan, and only when someone turned transcription on in the call. When that is true, it is free and nothing joins your meeting. When it is not — a free account, transcription left off, Zoom today — the recorder steps in, billed by the minute. We always pick the cheapest path that can actually deliver, and tell you plainly which one it was.

Both of those assume a call with a link. When there is no link — a conversation in a room, a call you recorded yourself — the question changes to whether you already hold the audio. If you do, nothing needs to join anything: hand the file over and it gets written up, at $0.24 an hour of audio.

The three paths above all need a call with a link. The most common recording in the world has neither: a phone face-down on the table while four people talk. So there is a fourth way in, and it asks nothing of the meeting at all — give 1Presence the audio and it writes it up. An interview, a lecture, a voice memo you left yourself, a site visit, a call you recorded on your own handset. If it left you a file, it can become a transcript.

Attach it in chat the way you would a photo, and ask. What comes back is filed exactly where a recorded meeting would be — under Meetings, by date and title, as a full transcript and a summary — so a conversation nothing joined sits alongside the ones that were captured live, searchable in the same breath. A file already in your vault works too, including one you saved out of an email or Drive; point it at that instead of uploading again.

• Attaching costs nothing, and starts nothing. A recording you drop into chat is kept and offered, never quietly put through a paid job. The transcription happens when you ask for it.
• $0.24 an hour of audio, drawn from the same balance as everything else, and charged on the real length of the recording. Nobody can tell you the total up front — not until it has listened and knows how long the thing actually is — so you get the rate before you commit, never a made-up figure.
• Several voices are pulled apart into Speaker 1, Speaker 2 and so on, up to thirty-two of them. It can hear that someone new is talking; it cannot hear who they are. Tell it once who was in the room and it will put the names in.
• A long one takes a few minutes. It starts the job and says so — and until the transcript is genuinely there, it will tell you it has not heard the recording rather than guess at what is on it.
• Audio or video, up to 500 MB — around eight hours of talking. Larger than that, export the audio on its own or split it in two.

With the right connection in place, you never touch a settings page. You talk, and it happens:

Hosting on Google Meet or Microsoft Teams? Those platforms write the transcript themselves, so 1Presence can read it for free with nothing joining the call — once two switches are flipped. Each guide walks the exact setup, including the part most people miss.