The first time you launch talat it walks you through a short guided setup. There are six steps, the same on Mac and Windows. Only the first, granting permissions, has to be completed to continue; the rest have sensible defaults, and every choice can be changed later in Settings.
1. Permissions
Grant access to your microphone and system audio. See the permissions page for the per-OS details.
2. Language
Tell talat whether your meetings are in English only or a mix of languages. This chooses the on-device speech model it uses: an English-tuned model that’s a little faster and sharper, or a multilingual model that also handles languages like Japanese, Arabic, and Korean. You can change this later in Settings → Transcription.
talat downloads the model you pick in the background, so there’s no separate download screen to wait on. If it hasn’t finished by the time you reach the main app, the status line at the bottom of the window shows progress, and a recording you start early begins the moment the model is ready. Windows has a little more to fetch than Mac, so give it a moment on a first run.
3. Meeting detection
Choose how talat reacts when it sees you’ve joined a call:
- Automatic. Detects conferencing apps and starts recording automatically.
- Ask me first. Shows a prompt and lets you decide each time.
- Manual only. Auto-detection stays off, and you press record yourself.
A fourth option, recording only for specific apps you tick, isn’t offered here. It’s available later under Settings → Recordings.
4. Summarisation
Choose whether talat writes a summary, action points, and a title at the end of each meeting. Pick Yes, on this computer to use the small local model that runs on your machine, with nothing to set up. Pick Not for now to skip it; you can turn it on whenever you like.
Later, in Settings → LLMs, you can point summaries at a cloud provider (OpenAI, Anthropic, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint) or a local Ollama instance, using your own API key. Cloud providers tend to produce better summaries on longer meetings; the transcript is sent to the provider you choose, and only then. If your machine doesn’t have enough memory for the local model, this step says so and points you to the cloud options you can configure later.
5. Name
Tell talat your name. This creates your own speaker profile, so your lines are labelled as you across every meeting, and talat can assume the microphone is you when that makes sense. It’s optional, and you can set or change it later from the Speakers area.
6. Review and launch
You’ll see your choices confirmed back to you before you launch talat. Remember, you can change everything at any time in the app via Settings.