Golden Minutes: Building a Privacy-First AI Meeting Notes System (Web + Desktop)

Why Golden Minutes

Meeting notes are high leverage, but most tools either:

• depend on everyone installing something,
• require uploading sensitive audio to unknown systems,
• or break in real environments (permissions, device routing, messy audio).

Golden Minutes is designed around a simple principle:

Capture what you can locally, process predictably, and export cleanly.

What Golden Minutes does today (no “real-time” claims)

Current focus:

• Web + desktop experience for taking meeting notes alongside calls
• Audio capture primitives (microphone + system audio foundations on desktop)
• Speech-to-text pipeline options (including local/client-side where feasible)
• Structured note generation after capture
• Export workflows (e.g., Notion)

I’m intentionally optimizing for correctness and trust before adding any “live” layer.

System architecture (high-level)

Signal: clear separation of capture, preprocessing, ASR, normalization, generation, and export.

Capture layer: where most products fail

The hardest part is not “summarization”. It’s capturing audio reliably across environments:

• Browser: permissions + device selection + meeting platform constraints
• Desktop: system audio capture differs by OS; device routing matters
• “Other participants don’t have the app”: means you must capture audio from your machine in a compliant way

So the design treats capture as a first-class subsystem with explicit constraints and fallbacks.

Data flow & responsibilities (web vs desktop)

Notes generation: structure beats fluff

The goal isn’t “a summary”. The goal is a useful meeting record.

Default structure I optimize for:

• Agenda / Context
• Key decisions
• Action items (owner + due date if available)
• Risks / blockers
• Next steps

Notion export: treat integrations as product features

Export isn’t a “nice-to-have”. It’s where trust is earned:

• stable formatting (headings, bullets, checklists)
• idempotent export (avoid duplicates)
• clear user control (“Export this version”)

I designed the export flow to be explicit and predictable, not magical.

What I learned building it

1. Capture is the product. Everything else depends on it.
2. Artifacts & versions reduce chaos. Especially when users regenerate notes.
3. UX matters as much as AI. People judge reliability by UI behavior.
4. Integrations are where value sticks. Notion export is a retention lever.

Roadmap (kept honest)

I’m improving:

• stability and cross-platform capture experience
• better template controls for regenerating notes
• chat-with-notes style retrieval (once the note artifacts are stable)

I’ll write a separate post when anything “live” ships.