Ever since Slipbox stopped being developed, I've been on the hunt for a similar AI meeting note-taking app for my Mac.

I've tried loads of them, but the one that has really stood out from the crowd for me is Mumble AI. It pretty much worked out of the box from day one and, most importantly, has consistently given me excellent meeting summaries.

I've now been using Mumble for around six months as my daily meeting notes app, and it has quietly become one of those apps I don't really think about anymore. I start a meeting, it does its thing, and afterwards I have a genuinely useful set of notes waiting for me.

It stays out of the way

One of the things I particularly like about Mumble is how unobtrusive it is.

When I start a Teams meeting, Mumble can automatically start recording in the background. There's no bot that needs to join the meeting and no extra participant appearing on the call.

It also doesn't leave recording controls floating around on screen, which is a small detail that I really appreciate. I regularly share my screen during customer and internal calls and I don't have to remember to hide Mumble first.

It simply sits in the background and captures the meeting.

It records both the audio coming from the Mac and my microphone, so it works equally well for a normal Teams call or a hybrid meeting where I have people sitting in the room with me as well as people joining remotely.

The Meetings tab is where Mumble shines

My go-to section is the Meetings tab. From here, I can start a new recording or go back and review previous meetings.

Like other apps in this space, Mumble can transcribe and summarise your meetings, and you can "chat" with the notes afterwards to ask questions such as "Who said this?", "What did we agree on again?" or "What actions did I take away from that meeting?"

Mumble also supports participant identification, so it can attempt to work out who said what during the meeting.

I'd say this works about as well as I've seen in other meeting apps. Sometimes it's impressively accurate; other times, not so much. You can manually add the names of participants though, and Mumble can learn their voices over time, which does help.

The summaries are the reason I keep using it

For me, meeting apps ultimately live and die by the quality of their summaries.

I've tried a lot of transcription and meeting apps on the Mac — Transcribe X, WhisperNotes, Spellar AI and plenty more. They all have their own strengths and quirks, but when it comes to turning what was actually discussed in a meeting into genuinely useful notes, nothing I've tried has come close to Mumble.

It's not just the accuracy either. It's the way Mumble structures the result.

Rather than giving me a huge wall of summarised text, it does a very good job of grouping related parts of the conversation together into logical sections. Each section contains the detail if I need it, while the overview gives me the important takeaways and actions.

That means I can use the notes in two different ways.

If I need to properly revisit a discussion, I can read through the detailed sections. If it's the following morning and I just want to remind myself what I agreed to do, I can scan the overview and immediately see the important points.

That's exactly what I want from a meeting summary.

You can make the summaries your own

The summary templates can also be customised, which is something I've come to appreciate more over time.

One of my pet peeves with AI summary apps is their obsession with emojis. They're fine for personal notes, but I really don't want every business meeting turned into a collection of 🚀, 🎯 and 💡 icons.

Mumble lets me turn them off.

It's a small thing, but being able to tailor the templates means the finished notes can look much more like something I'd actually write and use myself rather than obviously AI-generated content.

Finding old conversations is surprisingly useful

Once you've used an app like this every day for months, finding old information becomes almost as important as recording new meetings.

Mumble handles this particularly well.

Alongside Meetings, there's a People section where I can select someone and see the meetings they've been involved in. Mumble can then summarise that history too, including outstanding work items associated with that person.

I've found this genuinely useful. Rather than trying to remember which meeting something was discussed in, I can approach it from the other direction: "I know I discussed this with that person."

Being able to see the relevant meetings and outstanding actions together makes Mumble feel like more than just a folder full of transcripts.

Turning a meeting into a presentation

There's another feature I haven't really seen elsewhere: Mumble can create a slide deck directly from your meeting notes.

Initially, I thought this sounded a bit gimmicky but I've been pleasantly surprised by just how useful it can actually be.

The generated presentation can be exported as either PDF or HTML, making it very easy to share with other people. Personally, I've started using this as a follow-on from sales calls and it works surprisingly well.

It's probably not a feature I'd have gone looking for when choosing a meeting notes app, but it's one I've ended up using far more than I expected.

Local AI is a big plus

Mumble also gives you a lot of flexibility around privacy.

You can use its cloud service, or run the meeting workflow locally on your Mac. In Local Mode, Mumble says the recording, transcription, speaker identification and summary generation all happen on the device.

For business meetings in particular, I really like having that option.

There are different models available to download through the app, so you can decide whether you want to keep everything local or use the cloud service instead.

At the moment, the cloud option appears to be unlimited while Mumble is in beta. I suspect that may change once the app officially launches, but I've had meetings lasting three hours captured and summarised without any glitches or crashes.

Notes and Tasks are there too

Mumble also includes dedicated Notes and Tasks functionality.

I haven't personally used these very much, simply because I already have separate apps that handle those jobs for me (UpNote and BlitzIt for anyone interested). If you're looking for something that brings meetings, notes and follow-up tasks together in one place though, there's potentially quite a bit more here than just meeting transcription.

For my workflow, I prefer to let Mumble concentrate on capturing and summarising the meeting and then move the actions I care about into my existing task management setup.

It's still a beta

Mumble is still in beta, and occasionally that shows.

I've experienced the odd crash, and sometimes it hasn't automatically started recording when I've fired up Teams. Usually, restarting the app has been enough to sort things out.

That said, after around six months of using Mumble as my daily meeting notes app, I've only had one meeting fail to transcribe properly.

When that did happen, the developers were extremely proactive in helping me diagnose the problem and providing a fix, which gave me a lot more confidence in continuing to use it.

The big unknown right now is pricing

Mumble has been in beta for quite a while now, and the biggest question mark for me is what happens when it eventually leaves beta.

Right now, I'm not sure what the final pricing model will look like — particularly around cloud transcription and AI features. Given how much I use the app, that's probably my only real concern at this stage.

Recently, the developers also spun the dictation functionality out into its own smaller app. It'll be interesting to see whether that's a sign of things to come, with Mumble becoming more focused specifically on meetings while other functionality becomes separate products.

For now though, after trying a long list of alternatives, Mumble AI is the meeting app I've ended up sticking with.

For an app like this, I think that's probably the strongest recommendation I can give it.