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BYOK — Bring Your Own Key. You need an API key from your chosen AI provider. MeetingCost does not mark up or resell AI usage — you pay the provider directly at their published rates. Your API key is never stored in the cloud.

Supported AI Providers

ProviderBest forGet a key
AssemblyAIHigh-accuracy transcription with speaker diarizationassemblyai.com
OpenAI WhisperFast transcription + GPT-4 summaries and feedbackplatform.openai.com
DeepgramLow-latency real-time transcriptiondeepgram.com
Google GeminiIntegrated Google ecosystem, strong summarizationaistudio.google.com
Hugging FaceOpen-source models, privacy-focusedhuggingface.co
Rev.aiHuman-level accuracy, compliance-grade transcriptionrev.ai

Setting Up AI

  1. 1
    Select your AI Provider In the AI Insights panel, choose your provider from the dropdown. A link to get an API key appears below the dropdown.
  2. 2
    Enter your API Key Paste your API key into the API Key field. The key is stored in your browser session memory only — it is never written to local storage or the cloud and must be re-entered after Chrome restarts.
  3. 3
    Test the connection Click Test Connection to verify your key works. A green status indicator confirms the provider is reachable.
  4. 4
    Enable Auto-Transcribe (optional) Toggle Auto-transcribe to have MeetingCost begin transcribing automatically when a supported meeting is detected. You can also start transcription manually during a meeting.

Starting Transcription

There are two ways to start a transcription session:

  • Auto-transcribe: Enable this in settings and transcription starts automatically when you join a meeting on a supported platform.
  • Manual — Start Tab Capture: Click Start Tab Capture in the popup or AI Insights panel while in a meeting. This captures audio from the meeting tab and sends it to your AI provider. Works on Google Meet, Zoom, Teams, and Webex over HTTPS.
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Best practice for Tab Capture: With your meeting tab focused, click the MeetingCost icon in the Chrome toolbar, then click Start Tab Capture. This ensures Chrome grants the correct audio capture permissions. Tab capture does not work on chrome:// pages.

AI Usage Tracking

The AI Insights panel shows a usage meter tracking how much AI processing you've consumed this month. This uses the limits of your chosen provider's plan — MeetingCost does not impose additional limits. If you set a monthly minutes limit in settings, MeetingCost will warn you when you're approaching it.

AI Meeting Feedback

After a meeting ends and transcription is complete, MeetingCost generates structured AI feedback including:

Feedback ItemDescription
Meeting SummaryA concise summary of what was discussed, decided, and what action items were identified.
Cost Efficiency Score (0–100)Was the cost of this meeting justified by its outcomes?
Decision Quality Score (0–100)How clearly were decisions reached and documented?
Action Clarity Score (0–100)How specific and assigned were the next steps?
Async Replacement LikelihoodHigh / Medium / Low — could this meeting have been an email or async update?
Cost Reduction RecommendationsSpecific suggestions for reducing cost: fewer participants, shorter duration, moving to async, etc.
Waste SignalsPatterns detected that typically indicate meeting waste — off-topic discussion, unclear agenda, decision loops, etc.

Transcript History

The AI Insights panel keeps a scrollable history of recent meeting transcripts and summaries (up to 80 entries). You can browse previous meetings, review their summaries, and see how efficiency scores have changed over time. Each entry is timestamped and labelled with the meeting type if you've set it.

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PII Redaction: If Privacy → Redact PII is enabled, personally identifiable information (names, email addresses, phone numbers) is stripped from transcripts before they are stored or synced. See Security & Privacy for details.

AI Score Write-Back to Recurring Patterns

When AI feedback is generated for a meeting, MeetingCost automatically detects whether that meeting is part of a recurring pattern (e.g. "client call every Saturday"). If so, the AI ROI score is written back to the Recurring Patterns panel, populating the ROI score on that recurring series without any manual action needed.