Approach
Storing the audio is the easy way to do this.
Keeping every recording makes almost every feature simpler. It also turns a note taking tool into an archive of everything anybody said near your microphone. Amara AI keeps the useful half and throws the archive away, and this page is the argument for why that trade is worth making.
Disagreement with the retention model reaches the same mailbox as everything else, and gets an answer within five business days.
The one rule
Discard the audio, keep the note
Every other decision on this site follows from that sentence, including the awkward ones.
Speech is the densest personal information most people produce. A recording carries the words, and it also carries who was there, how they sounded, what they hesitated over, who interrupted whom, and the voice itself as a biometric. A written note carries almost none of that. It carries the part you wanted.
So the question a voice product has to answer first is not how good the transcription is. It is what happens to the recording afterwards. Most products answer by keeping it, because keeping it makes search work, makes the demo better, makes re-processing possible when the model improves, and makes the retention policy a paragraph rather than a design constraint.
We are answering the other way. The recording is destroyed once the note exists. That decision costs us features, and the honest thing to do is list them rather than pretend the trade is free.
What discarding the audio costs
| Not possible | Why | What you get instead |
|---|---|---|
| Search across everything you ever said | There is no archive to search | Notes in your own system, searched by whatever already searches it |
| Re-running a better model over old meetings | The old audio no longer exists | Better notes from the day the better model arrives, and no back catalogue of speech waiting to be reprocessed |
| Playing back the moment a decision was made | Nothing was kept to play | A quoted line in the note, marked as a quote, with the caveat that it came from a transcript |
| Voice identification of a returning speaker | No voiceprint is created, deliberately | Speaker labels within a single meeting, discarded with the recording |
| Training a house model on real meetings | Nothing is retained to train on | Whatever the underlying transcription service is good at, described honestly rather than dressed up as ours |
Before any feature is added we ask one question. Does this require keeping audio after the note exists? If it does, the feature does not get built, however much easier it would make the product to sell.
The hardest part
Everybody else in the meeting
The person who presses record has consented to something. The other seven people have not, and no amount of product design changes that.
This is the problem that voice note taking tools mostly handle by ignoring. The user agrees to terms, the user turns on recording, and the other participants find out later or never. Their words end up in a transcript on a server belonging to a company they have never heard of, under a policy they were never shown.
We cannot solve that with software, and we are not going to claim we have. What we can do is refuse to make it worse.
- Nothing is hidden. There is no discreet mode, no minimised indicator and no way to record a meeting without the fact being obvious in the room.
- Nothing is retained about them. Once the note exists, the recording of their voice is destroyed along with yours. No voiceprint is built, so nobody in that meeting becomes findable in a future recording.
- The obligation stays with you. You are the one who has to tell the room, and in several Australian states you are the one who needs everybody to agree before you start. The privacy policy names the statute that applies in each state and territory.
- Third party requests are answered. If somebody who was in a meeting writes to us about their own information, we will deal with them as an individual with rights rather than as somebody else's data.
The company
Who is making this argument
The entity behind the design, and the bar every part of it has to clear.
AMARA AI PTY LTD is a New South Wales proprietary company, and the tool described on this page is the whole of what it does. One product, one rule about the recording, and a set of retention commitments published with a version number against them so that anybody can hold the company to them.
The bar this design has to clear
- Deletion has to be provable rather than promised, which means naming exactly what is removed, when it goes, and what evidence exists that it happened.
- The consent flow has to be good enough that telling the room is the path of least resistance rather than an extra step people learn to skip.
- The note has to be better than the transcript by a margin that a sceptical person notices in the first meeting.
- The processing location and the sub-processor have to be nameable in public, because a privacy policy that says "our trusted partners" is not a privacy policy.
The verifiable facts
Everything below can be checked against an Australian public register without asking us.
- Registered name
- AMARA AI PTY LTD
- Company type
- Proprietary company limited by shares
- ACN
- 696 682 827
- ABN
- 73 696 682 827
- Home state
- New South Wales
- GST
- Registered
- Short form
- Amara AI is a contraction of the registered name, used here and in correspondence, rather than a separately registered business name
- Checking it yourself
- Both numbers resolve on public registers without an account or a fee. Look the ABN and its GST status up at abr.business.gov.au; the ACN sits on the company register kept by ASIC (Australian Securities and Investments Commission)
- Formal service
- Documents needing formal service go to the registered office held on file for ACN 696 682 827 by ASIC. That record is what governs, and a street address typed into a footer would not be
Name collision
We are not AmaraAI at amaraai.com
Two companies, similar names, no connection. This section exists so that nobody has to guess.
There is an established and unrelated company trading as AmaraAI at amaraai.com. They were using that name before this company existed. We are not affiliated with them, we are not a subsidiary, a partner, a reseller, a licensee or a successor, and we share no owners, no directors, no staff and no investors with them.
Anything you may have read about AmaraAI, good or bad, is about a different company unless it names AMARA AI PTY LTD or ACN 696 682 827. If you are looking for their product, their support, their pricing or their people, this site cannot help you and amaraai.com can.
We have not copied their positioning, their palette or their marketing, and we would rather lose the search traffic than collect a visitor who thinks they are somewhere else. If our similarity to them causes you a real problem, write to hello@amaraai.cc and say so plainly.