Meeting Notes and Signals: Never Lose an Action Item Again

Illustrative · pulled from real calls, with receipts

Most of what a team decides happens out loud in meetings, and then evaporates. HQ's meeting intelligence closes that gap: a meeting bot joins your calls, turns them into searchable notes, and automatically extracts the commitments, decisions, and risks buried inside them. Then "what are my action items?" becomes a question HQ can just answer.

The two halves: notes and signals#

Meeting notes are the raw record. The HQ meeting bot (powered by a service called Recall.ai) joins a call on Google Meet, Zoom, or Teams like any other participant, records and transcribes it, and files the result into your company (your team's isolated HQ workspace), one document per meeting, with the title, date, platform, and a full speaker-by-speaker transcript. From then on it's part of your company's searchable knowledge base (the organized information HQ can draw on), and it syncs to every teammate like any other company file.

Signals are the intelligence layer on top. After a meeting's notes land, HQ automatically extracts the discrete, citable items hiding in the transcript. Eight kinds:

Every signal keeps its receipts: a one-line normalized statement, plus a citation back to the exact moment in the source meeting. When HQ says you committed to something, it can show you where.

Reading them#

Two commands, both conversational:

/meeting-notes

Ask naturally: "show me yesterday's standup," "what did we cover in the Acme call," "search my meetings for pricing." HQ finds the right meeting and summarizes from the actual transcript. It answers from HQ's own store, it never goes rummaging through your email.

/signals

This is the one you'll use daily. "What are my action items?" "What did we decide this week?" "What risks came up in the roadmap call?" "What did Sarah commit to?" HQ reads the extracted signals, filtered by type, person, or date, and gives you a grouped, cited answer.

The "what's on my plate?" workflow#

This is where it compounds. Because every meeting feeds the signals store automatically, your open items accumulate in one queryable place instead of across notebooks and memories:

1. Monday morning: /signals → "what are my open action items from last week?"
2. Before a call: /meeting-notes → "what did we discuss with Acme last time?", instant context.
3. After a busy day: /signals → "what did I commit to today?", catch promises before they slip.
4. Weekly review: /signals → "decisions and risks from this week", a self-writing status update.

Because signals name their owners, "my action items" really does mean yours, distinct from your teammates', and each one links back to the meeting that created it.

Turning it on#

Meeting intelligence is part of HQ Cloud (see HQ Cloud explained), so there's a short activation ladder, usually done once by the team's Champion:

1. Cloud-back your company so it has a vault and sync:

   /designate-team <your-company-slug>

(If your team already syncs shared files, this is done. More in the team rollout guide.)

1. Connect your calendar, and the bot joins automatically. Connect your calendar in HQ Console (Integrations), or in the HQ app under Settings → Meetings → Connect calendars. Once meeting capture is on, HQ schedules the meeting bot for your upcoming calendar events (one bot per meeting), and it joins like a participant to handle recording and transcription. There's no per-call manual invite step.

1. Notes ingest automatically. After the call, the transcript and notes appear in your company's meeting store on their own, no export step, no copy-paste.

1. Signals extract automatically. Once notes exist, extraction runs on HQ cloud and files the signals. Ask /signals after your next meeting and they'll be there.

Recording from the HQ app

The HQ desktop app can also notice when you're on a Zoom, Microsoft Teams, or Google Meet call. When it does, you'll get a Meeting detected notification, and a card shows the meeting with a Start recording button. Use Record as to pick which company the recording belongs to, and Stop recording when you're done.

You can also send the meeting bot to a call yourself. Open Meetings, paste the Zoom or Google Meet link, and choose Tell bot to join now. When the transcript is ready, you'll see Done, transcript saved.

The settings are in Settings → Meetings: Meeting detection, Detected-meeting alerts, Recording company (where recordings go by default), and Connect calendars. Meetings on the left rail, just under Home (or Cmd+2), shows your meetings.

One honest footnote: signal extraction runs on HQ's cloud infrastructure and is part of HQ Workforce. On Workforce, meeting notes include 10 hours/month, then $1/hr (see pricing). It's enabled per company once your company is cloud-backed via /designate-team.

Common questions#

If you get stuck#

An empty store almost always means activation hasn't happened, start at step 1 above, and check sign-in with /hq-whoami if /designate-team complains. Sync issues (notes exist for a teammate but not for you) are covered in the sync guide. Anything else: /hq-bug.