In short: Nearly every AI meeting note tool on the market only works with virtual meetings (Zoom, Teams, Meet). But McKinsey reports that 70% of professionals say their most important conversations happen in person — hallways, conference rooms, coffee shops. Your phone is already a powerful enough computer to capture and process these conversations with AI.

The Blind Spot

Open any AI meeting tool’s marketing page. You’ll see the same integrations: Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams. Maybe Webex if they’re thorough.

Now think about where your most consequential conversations actually happen:

  • The hallway catch-up where your VP commits to headcount
  • The client lunch where scope gets redefined
  • The board room where strategy shifts
  • The coffee meeting where a partnership forms
  • The car ride where the real debrief happens

None of these have a Zoom link. None of these get captured by any mainstream AI meeting tool.

Why the Market Ignores In-Person

Two reasons:

1. Technical laziness. Bot-based recording plugs into meeting platform APIs — it’s a solved problem. On-device recording requires building actual audio capture, noise handling, and speaker separation for real-world acoustic environments. That’s hard.

2. Remote-work bias. The AI meeting tools boom happened during COVID when everything was virtual. The tools were built for that world. Now that hybrid and in-person work is back, the tools haven’t caught up.

The result: a massive gap in the market. The meetings that matter most are the ones nobody is capturing.

What You Actually Need

You don’t need special hardware. You don’t need a conference room mic array. You need:

  1. A phone in your pocket — modern smartphone microphones are surprisingly good at capturing room audio
  2. Or a smartwatch on your wrist — even more discreet, always available
  3. AI processing — speech-to-text, speaker identification, action/commitment extraction

That’s it. The hardware is already in your pocket. The missing piece is software that treats on-device audio as a first-class input — not an afterthought bolted onto a bot-based architecture.

How Keptivo Handles In-Person

Keptivo was built for in-person from day one, not retrofitted:

  1. Tap record on your phone or Apple Watch / Wear OS watch
  2. Audio captures on-device — the phone’s microphone picks up the room
  3. AI processes the recording — transcription, speaker identification (using persistent Voice ID), commitment extraction
  4. You get everything — summary, action items, commitments with owners, calendar events

No Zoom link. No laptop. No “let me set up the meeting bot.” Just a conversation and a device you already carry.

The Wearable Advantage

Smartwatch recording is particularly powerful for in-person capture:

  • Always available: Your watch is on your wrist. No fumbling with your phone.
  • Discreet: Tapping your watch is a natural gesture. Nobody notices.
  • Natural position: Your wrist is often closer to the conversation than a phone in your pocket.
  • Never forgotten: You might leave your phone on your desk. Your watch goes everywhere you go.

For professionals who move between meetings all day — consultants, sales teams, doctors, executives — wearable capture means never missing a conversation again.

Who This Is For

In-person AI meeting capture isn’t for everyone. It’s specifically valuable for:

  • Consultants and client-facing roles: Client meetings, site visits, workshops
  • Sales teams: Prospect meetings, trade shows, networking events
  • Healthcare professionals: Patient consultations, team rounds (with appropriate consent)
  • Executives: Board meetings, strategy sessions, 1-on-1s
  • Educators: Office hours, research meetings, committee discussions
  • Anyone in hybrid work: The mix of virtual and in-person that defines 2026

If your most important conversations don’t have a Zoom link, you need a tool that works without one.

Join the Keptivo waitlist — AI meeting capture that works anywhere you meet.