What's in an AI summary?

Once a recording is transcribed, Canto writes structured notes for it: a short overview, topic sections with timestamps, decisions, action items, and open questions, plus a generated title. Every claim in the notes is grounded in the transcript — if it wasn't said, it isn't in the notes.

What sections do the notes include?

• Overview — a one-to-two-sentence TL;DR of what was discussed and decided.
• Notes — anything you typed yourself, during or after the recording. The AI treats your notes as the priority outline: it keeps your headings and terminology and expands on the points you cared about.
• Agenda check — a short critique of how well the conversation followed its agenda. This section only appears under a specific condition — see below.
• Topic sections — the body of the notes, one section per major topic, with dense bullets and timestamps that link back to the transcript.
• Decisions — decisions that were actually made, not proposals. Empty meetings show none.
• Open questions — questions raised but left unanswered.
• Action items — every commitment with an owner and due date where one was mentioned, as a shared checklist. See Track action items across meetings.

The notes scale to the content: a five-minute voice memo gets one or two sections, a dense hour-long meeting gets many. Alongside the notes, Canto generates a title and tags for the recording.

When does the Agenda check appear?

Only when there was an agenda to check against: the calendar event linked to the recording has a description (that's where meeting agendas live), or your own typed notes contain an agenda. Without either, the section is omitted entirely — that's expected, not a failure. When it does run, it says which agenda items were covered, which were skipped or only touched, and what off-agenda topics took the time instead. The Agenda check renders on the web and in exports.

What language are the notes written in?

Notes, titles, and tags are written in your app language — the one you picked in settings — regardless of what language was spoken in the recording. Transcription itself stays auto-detect. See Change your language.

Can I change what the AI wrote?

Yes. The summary is editable markdown, individual action items can be edited, and clearing your edits reverts to the generated version. See Edit or regenerate a summary and title.

Troubleshooting

The notes say "Preparing AI"

Summarization starts right after transcription finishes and usually takes under a minute. If the status changes to AI failed — retry, tap it to run the AI pass again.

The notes seem thin

Short or quiet recordings produce short notes — Canto doesn't pad. If the transcript itself is wrong or empty, fix that first: see Why is my transcript empty or wrong?