The first time you launch talat it will walk you through a short guided flow: five screens on Mac, six on Windows. Every step after the first can be skipped, 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. 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.
3. Download and benchmark (Windows only)
Windows shows a download and benchmark screen before the feature choices. Models are fetched from the internet, then a short benchmark tests whether live preview and speaker recognition are viable on your hardware. No choice to make here. Wait for it to finish.
Mac skips this step. Downloads run in the background, and the status line at the bottom of the main window shows progress if it hasn't finished by the time you reach the main app.
4. Speaker recognition
Turn this on if you want talat to tell voices apart on calls with more than one person on the other side, and remember named speakers across future meetings.
Speaker recognition is imperfect, so talat provides various tools for reassigning, merging and deleting speakers during or after conversations.
Speaker recognition has a compute cost, so you may wish to disable it if you have a lower specification machine.
5. Summarisation
Turn this on to generate a summary, action items, and a title after each meeting ends. By default, talat uses a small local model that runs on your machine. You can't customise that provider at this stage; you can simply enable or disable the feature.
In Settings → Summaries you can switch to a cloud provider (OpenAI, Anthropic, OpenRouter, and others) using your own API key, or to a local Ollama instance. Cloud providers produce better summaries on longer meetings. The transcript is sent to the provider you choose.
If your machine doesn’t have enough memory for the local model, the step shows a warning and points you at the cloud providers you can configure later in Settings.
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.