How To Set Up And Use Affinity Notetaker

Set up Affinity Notetaker, add it to your meetings, and find, edit and manage the meeting notes and transcripts it creates.

How-to — task-oriented recipe.

Affinity Notetaker joins your video meetings, transcribes them, and adds an AI summary note to the meeting in Affinity. You also get the summary by email. This article covers setting it up, using it in meetings, and working with the notes and transcripts it creates.

Admins control Notetaker for the whole organization, including who can edit its notes and whether transcripts are kept. See Affinity Notetaker admin settings. If Notetaker doesn’t join or no note appears, see Troubleshooting for Affinity Notetaker.

Before you start

Essential	Scale	Advanced	Enterprise
No	Yes	Yes	Yes

• Calendar: Google or Microsoft 365. Notetaker isn’t available for Microsoft Exchange (on-premises) calendars.
• Meeting platforms: Zoom (web and desktop app), Microsoft Teams and Google Meet.
• Zoom only: the meeting host needs to join the meeting so Notetaker can record, unless the host is an Affinity user who has connected Zoom (see Set up Notetaker). Teams and Meet don’t need the host to join.
• Languages: transcripts are created in the language spoken most in the meeting: English, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish or Ukrainian. Other languages spoken in the meeting aren’t transcribed. Meeting notes are in English unless an admin chooses Match meeting language.

Interested in upgrading? Reach out to your Affinity point of contact or [e-mail].

Zoom requirements

1. Your organization’s Zoom admin must first approve the Affinity app in the Zoom App Marketplace. Until they do, you’ll see You cannot authorize Affinity Notetaker.
2. Each person using Notetaker needs local recording turned on in Zoom. Your Zoom admin can turn it on for everyone instead.
   • In Zoom on the web (not the desktop app), go to Settings → Recording.
   • Turn on Record to computer files.
   • Under Who can request host permission to record?, check the participants you want to allow.
   • If your security team allows it, also check Auto approve their permission requests. This helps when someone who isn’t an Affinity user, such as an executive assistant, hosts meetings for your team. They still need to join the meeting for the approval to happen.
   

This applies to Zoom meetings you host. If someone else hosts, Notetaker may not be able to record unless they’ve set this up too and join the meeting.

Set up Notetaker

1. Go to Settings → Notetaker.
2. Choose your settings:
   • Connect with Zoom (Zoom users only): lets Notetaker join and record Zoom meetings you host, even if you don’t join.
   • Appearance: your Notetaker’s name, and whether it shows an Active Avatar or No Avatar in meetings. The name also appears as the author of its notes.
   • Join Automatically: have Notetaker join all your meetings, only internal meetings, only external meetings, or none by default. You can still turn it on or off for each meeting.
3. Click Save.

If you don’t see Notetaker in Settings, your admin has turned Notetaker off for your organization.

Add Notetaker to a meeting

1. Click Meetings in the left navigation. You’ll see your synced meetings from yesterday, today and the next two weeks.
2. Turn on the Notetaker toggle for the meeting.
3. Notetaker joins at the scheduled start time, or straight away if the meeting has already started. On the call it appears as a participant with your Notetaker’s name. It doesn’t speak or interact.
   • When it’s recording, its avatar is green.
   • When it’s inactive, it shows Notetaker is inactive (for example, when the Zoom host hasn’t allowed recording).

• Meeting started early? Hover over the meeting, click the three dots, then click Invite Notetaker Now.
• Notetaker didn’t join, went inactive, or was removed? Turn its toggle off and on again to bring it back.
• No toggle on a meeting? Make a small edit to the meeting in your calendar so it re-syncs.
• Meeting missing? It may have been deleted from your calendar, or include someone on your firm’s blocklist (learn more).

More than one person turned on Notetaker? Only one Notetaker per organization joins a meeting. If the organizer is one of them, it’s the organizer’s; otherwise Affinity picks one. You can tell whose it is from its name on the call.

Remove Notetaker from a meeting

• If it’s your Notetaker, turn off its toggle on the Meetings page.
• The meeting host can also remove it from the call. Notetaker keeps what it transcribed up to that point.

After the meeting

Within a few minutes of the meeting ending:

• You get a summary email with the meeting’s Agenda, Key Highlights, Next Steps and Summary, and links to View Note in CRM and View Full Transcript. Who else gets the email depends on your admin’s summary email setting. External participants never get it.
• The note is added to Affinity on the meeting, so it appears on the Activity Timeline and Notes tab of the external participants and their companies.
• To read the transcript, click View Transcript on the note.

If you wrote your own note for the same meeting, whichever note is published second is added as a reply to the first.

To find every summary Notetaker has emailed you, search your inbox for [e-mail].

Internal meetings

An internal meeting is one where everyone invited is from your organization. Your admin decides whether Notetaker creates notes for them:

• Notes on: a note is created and attached to the meeting, but it doesn’t appear on your company’s profile. Open it from the link in the summary email, or tag a person, company or opportunity so it shows on their profile. On Enterprise, only the participants can see it unless its sharing is changed. On Scale and Advanced, everyone in your organization can see it.
• Notes off (default): you only get the summary email. No note or transcript is saved in Affinity.

See Internal meeting notes creation for details.

A 1:1 with someone who doesn’t yet have a profile in Affinity counts as an internal meeting. Make sure external attendees have a profile before the meeting.

Edit a Notetaker note

A Notetaker note can be edited like any other note: its text, the people, companies and opportunities it’s tagged to, and (on Enterprise) who it’s shared with. Open the note’s action menu (the three dots) and click Edit.

• By default, only the note’s creator can edit it: the person whose Notetaker joined the meeting. That’s usually the person who turned Notetaker on.
• If your admin allows it, everyone from your team who was on the invite can edit it too, except from a profile’s Activity Timeline for now. See Meeting note edit permissions.
• Only the creator can delete the note or its transcript.

If the person who turned Notetaker on is removed from the invite before the meeting, or was only invited through a group address, Affinity makes another internal attendee the note’s creator so a note is still created.

On Enterprise, the note is first shared according to your admin’s Fallback Behavior setting (see Enterprise permissions). On other plans, everyone in your organization can see it.

Delete a transcript

If you created a Notetaker note, you can permanently delete its transcript and keep the summary note.

1. Open the note’s action menu (the three dots on the note).
2. Click Delete Transcript.
3. Click Delete to confirm.

The transcript can’t be restored. The summary note stays as it is, and View Transcript no longer appears on it. On the iOS app (version 5.56.0 or later), you can delete a transcript from the transcript screen.

• Only the note’s creator can delete its transcript, even if teammates can edit the note.
• You can’t delete transcripts from the browser extensions or the API yet, and there’s no bulk delete.
• Deleting the note also deletes its transcript.
• To stop Affinity keeping transcripts for all future meetings, an admin can turn off Transcript retention.

Frequently asked questions

Why use Affinity Notetaker instead of another note-taking tool?

• It’s built for private capital and dealmaking, and adds notes straight into your CRM so Affinity stays your source of truth.
• Affinity’s contracts with AI providers prevent customer data being used to train AI models.

Can I turn off the summary email just for myself?

• Not at the moment. Summary email recipients is an org-level setting that an admin changes for everyone.

Can we stop Affinity storing transcripts?

• Yes. An admin can turn off Transcript retention for future meetings. To remove one transcript you already have, delete it.

Can I export our transcripts?

• Yes. See Export transcripts in bulk.

Is there a time limit on meetings?

• No. Notetaker stays for the whole meeting, however long it runs. It only creates a note for meetings that last at least 5 minutes.

Why didn’t Notetaker join, or why is there no note?

• See Troubleshooting for Affinity Notetaker, including how long Notetaker waits when no one has joined and which meeting link it uses.