Earkeep for project managers

Project managers on r/projectmanagement put the accountability gap plainly: "It is your job to deliver the project but it is not your job to do the work. […] In most places I have worked the PM has no authority from an HR standpoint." And in the same breath: "In the end, the project needs to be on time and on budget, and SOMEONE has to make that happen."

That someone is you. You deliver on time, on budget, and in scope, using work you don't do and commitments you can't enforce, and you're the one holding the bag when any of it slips. Everything below is about one thing: making sure the record of who said they'd do what, and when, is never the weak link in that chain.

PMs on the same forum describe days that are mostly meetings by volume: "I typically have 7-9 projects […] I spend probably 4-5 hours per day in back to back meetings." Another: "I manage about 4.5 projects on average and I am in about 6 hours of meetings a day." The self-deprecating summary that topped that thread still lands: "45% Meetings, 25% planning and validating scope, 29% Resource Management, 1% sitting on the toilet laughing at cat videos."

Spread across a real week, that's project status meetings and team check-ins per project, client-facing calls with their own prep, steering group or sponsor updates, kickoffs, vendor calls, standups on agile-ish teams, and escalation firefights slotted in wherever there's a gap. Every one of them can produce a decision, an action item, or a commitment that someone will ask about later.

Ask PMs what's hardest about running meetings and the answer is consistent: "Taking minutes, action points and decisions is one of my biggest issues with being responsible for meetings, especially when the discussion is technical."

The workaround practitioners land on independently is record-and-relisten: "Record and relisten. […] I spend all meeting just being engaged. But when I relisten I take notes, I do follow ups, I send out notes/actions/update Jira/etc. It's amazing how much it improves things." But that assumes there's time to relisten, and back-to-back days don't leave much: "Who the hell has time to send minutes out an hour after a meeting when you're in back to back meetings regularly? I'm lucky if I get them out within 48 hours."

Without a written record, memory doesn't stay neutral: "Without them, information gets forgotten, and blame-shifting becomes common." Commitments are the sharpest version of this, especially made upward, where a PM has the least leverage: "I recently asked my boss over chat if they completed one of their action items from last week's meeting and they said no […] The next time we met [I was told I can't assign them action items]."

One reply in that thread names the actual fix before any tool exists to do it: "Change 'Action Items' to 'Commitments' and each bullet item as 'Boss A said they would….'" That's a request for a quote, attributed to a person, with a time on it.

Earkeep runs continuously while it's open, recording mic and system audio and transcribing it locally, so nothing depends on remembering to hit record before a status call or a sponsor drops a decision mid-sentence.

• No start/stop bet. A meeting is a span of the timeline you select after the fact, once you already know a call mattered, or your calendar starts and ends it for you. The record-and-relisten workflow PMs already swear by stops being a habit you have to sustain across six hours of meetings a day; it's just how the app works.
• Calendar auto-spans close the gap for good. Connect Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, Outlook, or any ICS calendar URL, and every scheduled status meeting, client call, and steering update is captured and spanned automatically, with zero chance of forgetting the one meeting that turns out to matter most.
• No bot in client-facing calls. Client meetings are exactly where inviting a vendor bot isn't an option: procurement won't allow it, the client will notice, or it's simply awkward to ask. Earkeep captures from your own device, mic plus system audio, headphones included, invisible to the call.
• Minutes on your schedule, not a race against memory. Every call from a back-to-back day is already a searchable, timestamped transcript by the time you sit down to write minutes, whether that's an hour later or two days later.
• Commitments become quotable, not disputable. When someone denies an action item, you have the actual sentence and when it was said. "Boss A said they would…" stops being a paraphrase you're defending and becomes a line you can cite.

Capture isn't where PMs say the real gap is. It's turning a day of transcripts into minutes, action items, and updated tickets without doing that by hand every night. Earkeep runs in-app agents (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor Agent, Gemini CLI, Hermes, Kimi CLI, OpenClaw, opencode, Pi, Qwen Code, or any ACP-compatible agent) directly against your local meeting history, plus a built-in MCP server so external tools can read it too.

A realistic end of day: point an agent at today's spans and have it draft the minutes email for the steering call, list action items with owner and quoted commitment for the status meetings, and push updates into Jira, Asana, or MS Project through MCP. Nothing here requires uploading a transcript anywhere; the agent runs against plain local files on your disk.

That local-only shape matters beyond convenience. PMs report real policy walls around AI notetaking: "My current company doesn't allow use of AI for minutes," because for most tools that means client audio leaving the building for a vendor's cloud. Earkeep never uploads audio anywhere, so the conversation with IT or a client's procurement team is a different one: there's no API call to point at and no third-party server processing the recording, just a transcript in a plain file on your own laptop.

• Cloud AI notetakers (Otter, Fireflies, and similar) capture well on video calls but need a bot in the meeting, which doesn't work for every client call, and charge $15-30 per user per month, forever. See Earkeep vs Otter and Earkeep vs Fireflies.
• Granola is the closest philosophical match, no bot, but still cloud-processed and still a recurring per-seat charge. See Earkeep vs Granola.
• Platform-native transcription (Zoom AI summaries, Teams transcription and Copilot) is solid when the whole meeting stays on that one platform, and blind to anything else, including the in-person conversation with a colleague who dropped by your desk.
• Rewind and Limitless had the same always-on ambition and were discontinued after Meta's December 2025 acquisition. If you relied on one, see Earkeep vs Limitless.
• Manual systems (OneNote with timestamped recordings, Excel action logs, email as the record of minutes) are reliable but entirely on the PM to populate, call by call, by hand.

One PM thread names the requirement almost exactly as Earkeep's design brief, without knowing it: "I wear headphones, and Otter doesn't seem to capture audio […] I want something that doesn't require a bot to join, just records/transcribes from my device."

€39, once, for one device. No per-seat subscription, no monthly meter running against a stack of concurrent projects. Try the full app free for 14 days, no email, no account required, against your real meeting week. Purchases carry a 14-day, no-questions money-back guarantee. See full pricing details →