Built for
Your company blocks
notetaker bots.
The tool worked until IT decided it didn't. Heliotype records the same meeting from your Mac — nothing joins the call, so there is nothing for a policy to keep in the lobby.
The situation
Microsoft's bot detection reached general availability in Teams in early June 2026: third-party recording bots wait in the lobby until an organizer admits them, meeting by meeting. Plenty of organizations went further and blocked them outright, because a bot has to export meeting content out of the tenant to work, and that puts the conversation under a vendor's privacy policy instead of the company's.
If you are the person who now takes notes by hand while everyone else talks, the problem is not that you lost a feature. It is that the meeting still needs a record, and the approved options are worse.
Why Heliotype is unaffected
Heliotype is not a service that joins your call. It is an app on your Mac that records the audio your Mac is already playing and hearing — the meeting through a supported macOS audio tap, you through the microphone. There is no participant to detect, no bot to admit, no lobby. The meeting looks exactly as it would if you were not recording, because from the platform's point of view, nothing is.
It also means the recording itself stays on your machine. Three
things reach the network in total, and only one of them is yours: the
audio track Heliotype extracts from a file you ask it to transcribe,
sent to your own AssemblyAI account under your own key — a processor
you signed up with, not one we picked for you. The other two carry
nothing about you — a one-off download of the ffmpeg
audio tool the first time one is needed, and the static version file
Settings → Check for Updates… fetches the moment you
click it. All three are itemised here, and
the whole data story is one page, and it is
short.
What your day looks like
- Click record in the menu bar when the call starts — or use the floating button that stays above every window.
- Talk normally. No announcement, no extra name in the list, no purple screen-recording indicator (the tap is audio-only).
- Stop. The recording is already named after the meeting on your calendar, and a speaker-labeled transcript is written beside it in your folder.
- Hand the transcript to your AI. Drag it into Claude or ChatGPT and ask what you committed to. That step stays yours — Heliotype does not summarize.
Questions IT will ask
Where does the data go? Recordings and transcripts stay in a folder on the Mac. Only extracted audio goes out, only at transcription time, only to AssemblyAI, authenticated with the user's own key. No account with us, no telemetry, no analytics.
Is it signed? Yes — Developer ID signed and notarized by Apple, with a published SHA-256 for the disk image on the changelog.
Does it capture the screen? No. Audio only, which is why no screen-recording indicator appears.
What if we forbid recording entirely? Then don't use it. This is a tool for people who are allowed to record and need the record to be theirs.
More detail on the mechanism: how recording without a bot actually works. Or read what it can't do first — that page is usually faster. Same tool, different job: client calls and research interviews.