Radiant App Review: Botless AI Note Taker for Mac (2026)

Most AI note-takers solve the transcript problem and stop there. You still spend 20–30 minutes after every important meeting writing follow-up emails, pulling out action items, and figuring out what to do with the wall of text they handed you. That's the part nobody talks about when they say meetings are productivity killers.

I take 10–30 meetings a week. I've tried manual notes (lose focus while typing), Fellow AI, Notta, custom GPTs, and everything in between. The post-meeting admin grind followed me everywhere. Then I switched to Radiant, and the workflow actually changed.

Why the bot problem matters more than you think#

Every major AI note-taker joins your meeting as a visible bot participant. Everyone in the call sees it. Some people don't care. Others judge you for it, get uncomfortable, or ask you to remove it. In certain contexts, client calls, sensitive conversations, informal check-ins, it changes the dynamic.

Radiant doesn't join the meeting at all. It records audio locally on your Mac, capturing everything without touching the meeting itself. No bot entry notification, no participant list entry, nothing. And because it's recording at the system level rather than inside the meeting platform, it works with any software: Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, WhatsApp calls, Skype, or an in-person conversation with your laptop open.

The Mac-only limitation is real. If you're on Windows, you'll need to join a waitlist, they're building it, but it's not there yet.

Setup takes about two minutes#

Download Radiant from their site, drag it into your Applications folder, and open it. Connect your Google Calendar and it immediately populates your upcoming meetings on the home screen. When a meeting starts, Radiant auto-detects it and begins capturing in the top-right corner, a small recording indicator, nothing visible to anyone else on the call.

When the meeting ends, Radiant auto-detects that too, stops recording, and drops you into the meeting view. You get a transcript with auto-detected speakers (you can assign names), a summary, and the full chat interface.

The search function is genuinely useful here. You can ask "what meetings did I discuss pricing in?" across your entire library and get timestamped results. For anyone running a lot of recurring calls with the same clients or teams, that searchability compounds fast.

The part that actually saves time: workflow shortcuts#

The transcript and summary are table stakes. What makes Radiant different is the shortcuts system.

Type / in the chat box and you get a list of pre-built workflow shortcuts: action items (with owner assignments), follow-up email, scheduling a follow-up, summary in another language. Select one and hit enter, it runs against your transcript and generates the output in seconds.

The follow-up email shortcut is the one I run on almost every call. It drafts a complete email with key decisions, open items, and next steps, then gives you a "Continue in Gmail" button that opens your email client with the draft already formatted. You just type the recipient's address and send. You can also tell it to make the email longer or shorter right in the chat before sending.

The action items shortcut pulls every commitment from the transcript and assigns ownership based on who said what. Copy it to Notion, Google Docs, or your project management tool in one click.

Custom shortcuts are where this gets powerful#

The pre-built shortcuts cover the basics. The custom shortcut builder is where you replicate your actual workflow.

Go to the shortcut creator, give it a name, write the prompt, and set it to one of three modes: auto-start (runs automatically after every meeting), always suggest (appears as a one-click option in your sidebar), or on-demand (you call it manually with /).

I've built shortcuts for content creator recaps, podcast prep notes, executive summaries, decision trackers, next-meeting agendas, and strategic insight extraction. The strategic insights one is my favorite, it scans the transcript for competitive intelligence, identified opportunities, risks, and "aha moments," then outputs a structured brief.

Building these from scratch takes trial and error. I've packaged my 10 most useful ones into a free download so you don't have to.

If you want to go deeper on building a full post-meeting productivity system, that's a separate guide worth reading alongside this setup.

One more feature worth knowing: meeting stats#

After any recorded meeting, you can run a stats analysis that shows who spoke, for how long, which topics came up, and how time was distributed. For a daily standup capped at 10 minutes, this tells you exactly whether certain people or topics are consistently eating the clock. It's a small feature, but the kind of thing that's quietly useful for anyone running recurring team meetings.

The honest take#

Radiant is free because it's in beta. That will change at some point. If you're on Mac and running more than 10 meetings a week, the window to get full access at no cost is worth taking seriously. I've been using it for three months and the product has improved noticeably in that time, they're actively building.

The two things to know going in: it's Mac-only for now, and the free pricing is tied to the beta. Neither of those is a reason to wait if you're on a Mac and currently losing 20–30 minutes per meeting to follow-up admin.

Watch the full video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/QS9EhgylJWI

Some links below may be affiliate links. I only recommend tools I actually use, and it may give you a discount if you use my links.