Release notes

All notable changes to Plática Notes, newest first.

1.16.3 - 2026-08-24

The in-meeting indicator no longer looks like a camera. It was a red pill with a dot and a running clock, reading Recording, which is the visual language every video tool uses for "this call is being filmed". People read it that way and it frightened them. This extension records no video and no audio: it reads the captions Google already generates. The indicator now says Transcribing, with a violet dot while it runs and a grey square when paused, and it no longer shouts in red.
The clock left the meeting and went into the popup. It was there to show that capture was alive, but it never did that: it counted from the moment you joined whether or not a single word was arriving. The elapsed time is still on the toolbar popup, where you ask for it, and what actually watches for silent failure is the notice that says so in as many words.

1.16.2 - 2026-08-23

Meetings are saved with their real name again. With certain other extensions installed, Chrome was throwing away the filename this extension asked for, and a saved meeting landed in the root of your Downloads folder as download, download (1), download (2) and so on: no title, no date, no folder, not even a .md on the end. The transcript inside was always intact, so nothing was ever lost, but you could not tell one file from another without opening it. The name is now re-asserted at the point where Chrome decides it, so it survives a neighbour that stays silent. Files already saved under a wrong name stay as they are.

1.16.1 - 2026-08-22

The release notes no longer open with an empty heading. This page carried an "Unreleased" heading above the newest version with nothing under it, which reads as something that failed to load rather than as the placeholder it is.

1.16.0 - 2026-08-21

Every screen has been redesigned. One visual language now runs through the popup, settings, history, the first-run page, the documentation pages and the in-meeting overlay, and it is taken from what the extension produces: a saved meeting is a sequence of speaker-attributed turns (a coloured name, a monospace clock, a body), so every group on every screen is drawn the same way, and the colours are the ones the live transcript panel already used for speakers. Times, counts, folder paths and language tags are set in monospace throughout, because they are data. Red now means exactly two things and nothing else: capture is live, or this control destroys something.
The toolbar popup finally answers the question you opened it to ask. It showed a screen-sharing toggle and a link. It now leads with the meeting: whether capture is running, how long it has been running, the title, the language, whether the meeting is private, and the exact folder the file will land in. Between calls it names the last meeting it saved. Hiding the on-screen controls is still one click, just no longer the most prominent thing on the surface.
Deleting a meeting from the history list can be taken back. It used to be a browser confirmation box and then gone for good, on a transcript that exists nowhere else in the extension. The row now goes immediately and an Undo stays available for ten seconds, which is the protection the dialog was pretending to be. This is the history page, not Wipe: wiping a live meeting still cannot be undone, and is still guarded by having to confirm it. Re-downloading a meeting also reports where the file landed instead of succeeding in silence.
Meeting history is a list you can search. Titles no longer get squeezed into a table column: meetings are grouped by month, newest first, with a filter box, a private-or-not marker, the turn count and the caption language on each row, and a button that opens your Downloads folder. Its empty state now says what to do instead of showing an empty table header.
You can see how many meetings history keeps, and change it. The limit was fixed at thirty and mentioned nowhere, so the thirty-first meeting silently pushed the oldest out of the list. It is now a setting, and both the history page and the setting say plainly that the .md files already in your Downloads folder are never touched.
Settings tells you it saved, and shows you the path before you commit to it. Eight controls wrote to storage without a word of acknowledgement. Each group now also carries its own current value on its heading, so the whole configuration can be read without opening a control, and each folder field previews the exact path the download will use, including when what you typed would be rewritten, which previously only surfaced as a file in an unexpected place hours later.
Help is the user manual. The Help link opened the project's README: install from source, architecture notes, contributor instructions. It now opens the actual manual, with its figures, and the manual, release notes and privacy policy can reach each other and get back to the extension.
The first-run page explains the product instead of asking one question. It now says what happens in three steps (join a call, watch or annotate the transcript, find the file in Downloads), and lets you pin the two or three languages you meet in, which is the setting that makes the in-meeting controls worth using and which was previously buried.
The confirmation on Wipe can be read. Armed, it was red text on an amber fill, at the one moment it had to be legible, and it did not say what the next click would do. It is now dark ink on amber and says so.
The in-meeting controls work from the keyboard, and say what the keys are. The overflow menu opens with the arrow keys, walks its rows with them and closes with Escape, giving focus back where it came from; every control everywhere now has a visible focus ring, which the overlay had nowhere at all. The menu also names the two shortcuts (mark this moment, hide the controls) where the question actually comes up rather than only in Settings. Choosing something in the menu now closes it.
On-screen confirmations get out of the way in three seconds. They used to sit there for eight, four or five depending on which one it was, over somebody's face on a live call, repeating what the permanent recording pill already says. One duration now, and anything that actually needs acting on is a notice that does not auto-dismiss at all rather than a toast that vanishes.
The recording pill carries the elapsed time. A clock that has stopped moving says something is wrong sooner than any warning can.
Anything that moves respects "reduce motion", and the language picker works in dark mode. The pinned-language chips were hard-coded white on white text, so on a dark settings page they were an unreadable stripe of foreign UI.
The "not recording speech" notice no longer cries wolf. It could appear on a meeting that was recording perfectly, and once shown it stayed on screen into the next meeting in that tab. It now goes away by itself if recording turns out to be fine, and never outlives the meeting it belongs to.
Recording now survives another meeting recorder in the same tab. With a second recording extension installed, Plática Notes captured nothing at all — no speech, no participants, nothing. It saw one of the fourteen channels Google Meet opens, and not the one captions arrive on, so it never asked for them. It now attaches to each connection directly instead of assuming it is the only extension on the page, and works alongside the other recorder rather than needing it turned off.
The in-meeting controls are down to what you need mid-call. The bar showed eight buttons on top of your meeting; it now shows whether it is recording, your language buttons, and a menu. The recording pill also carries the padlock when a meeting is private, so hiding that toggle does not hide the state. Everything else — the full language list, the transcript panel, the private toggle — moved into the menu. Wipe moved there too, and that one is not about tidiness: it is the only control that destroys what has been captured, and it no longer sits a stray click away from the language buttons. It still asks before it fires.
A meeting that is not recording speech now says so. This used to fail silently: the meeting ran, the panel stayed empty, and the first sign was a missing file afterwards. A notice now appears while there is still time to fix it, and it names the usual cause — a second meeting-recorder extension in the same tab, since only one of them can read Meet's captions. It does not fire on a quiet meeting: a call where nobody has spoken yet is normal and stays silent.
Links in the live panel are clickable. A link someone pastes into the meeting chat used to be plain text you had to retype. It now opens in a new tab — never the current one, which would leave the call. Only http and https links become clickable, nothing is prefetched or previewed, and the address the meeting is on is not passed to the site you open.
A button per language you actually use. Pick up to three in Settings and each one gets its own flag button in the meeting, so switching the recording language is a single click instead of a trip through a list of fourteen. Nothing is hidden: the full list stays in the meeting's menu, for the call you did not see coming.
The debug log now says what produced it. Each log starts with the extension version and build, the browser, and the settings that decide what capture does. Diagnostic events from the first moments of a meeting are no longer dropped either — which is exactly the part worth reading when capture fails to start. It also counts what happened to the captions: how many arrived, how many the decoder could read, and how many were saved. A gap between those numbers is the difference between "nobody spoke" and "something is broken", which until now nothing recorded.
The language list is in Google Meet's own order. It used to open with whichever language happened to have been typed into the list first, which is no way to decide what fourteen people from fourteen places see at the top. It now follows the order Meet's own caption settings use, so a language is where you already expect it and no one market leads by accident. Pinning is how a language gets to the top, per profile, and the default for a fresh install is unchanged.

1.15.0 - 2026-08-20

Saved meetings are filed by month. Transcripts now land in a YYYY-MM subfolder of your chosen folder instead of piling into one flat directory. Debug logs follow the same split. Files saved earlier stay where they are.
New file names. A saved meeting is now 2026-08-04_15-59_Payments_status_exb-zusa-qnc.md: date first so a folder sorts chronologically, no spaces anywhere, and the meeting code at the end so every occurrence of a recurring meeting can be pulled with one glob. The code is left out when the meeting has none.
The elapsed offset is now always +HH:MM:SS. It used to be +05:12 for the first hour and +1:00:41 after it, so a tool written against a short meeting matched the beginning of a long one and silently skipped the rest. One shape now covers the whole file, and the offsets sort as plain strings.
Each turn carries a full timestamp and its duration. A turn header was 15:59 · +05:12; it is now the complete local time with UTC offset, how long the turn lasted, and the elapsed offset. A tool reading the file no longer has to add the offset to the header's start time to know when something was said, and can tell where a speaker's turn ended instead of guessing from the text. Chat messages, notes and join/leave markers are instants, so they carry no duration.
Participants without a full name are no longer dropped. Meet does not always send a participant's full name — guests, dial-ins and some external participants arrive with only a short display name, and those people were skipped entirely: missing from the participant list, with their speech left under a "Speaker N" label. The short name is now used when the full one is absent.
A packet carrying several roster updates is now read in full. Joins and departures can arrive batched, and only the first entry of such a packet was decoded; the rest were learned late or not at all, which could put a participant's join at the wrong moment. Every record in a packet is now read, on both the join and the leave path.

1.14.1 - 2026-08-14

Speakers Meet names late are no longer stuck as "Speaker 360". Meet does not always announce a participant's name while they are in the call — on an observed meeting it sent two people's names for the first time only as they left. Their turns now pick up the real name as soon as it arrives, and the saved file's participant list no longer omits people whose speech is in the transcript.

1.14.0 - 2026-07-29

Recording on/off toggle. A new in-meeting pill (● Rec / ⏸ Rec off) pauses and resumes capture without leaving the call. Turning it off stops everything new — transcript, chat, join/leave markers, and notes — and the state survives a page reload. Whatever was captured before you turned it off is still saved when the meeting ends.
Wipe recording. A new in-meeting pill (🗑) clears everything captured in the current meeting so far — transcript, chat, notes, and presence markers. Click once to arm it, once more to confirm. A meeting left with nothing captured writes no file.

1.13.1 - 2026-07-09

Leave markers are now immediate and reliable. They previously lagged by a minute or two, or were missed entirely, because they keyed off Meet's delayed device-removal signal. They now fire within about a second of someone leaving, matching Meet's own People panel.
The chat link in the saved file is now openable. 1.13.0 recorded a raw embedded-frame URL that did not open; the front matter now carries a clean chat.google.com link to the meeting's conversation.

1.13.0 - 2026-07-09

Chat from other participants is now captured. Their in-meeting chat messages were never recorded before. The transcript now includes the full meeting chat, from every participant and from you, read locally and never transmitted, with duplicates filtered out.
Inline join and leave markers. The transcript now notes when someone joins or leaves during the meeting, inline on the timeline with a timestamp and in the speaker's colour, instead of only the final participant list in the header.
A notice when the extension is updated mid-meeting. If the extension is reloaded or updated during a call, an on-screen banner now tells you to rejoin so the meeting is saved, instead of failing silently.
More faithful transcript order. When a speaker is interrupted and keeps talking, their later words no longer sort back into their earlier paragraph, and a new paragraph starts after a long pause, in the live panel and the saved file alike.
A chat link in the saved file. The header now carries a link to the meeting's Google Chat conversation, so a downstream tool can reach attachments or messages that are not in the transcript.
Panel fixes. The live panel keeps its place when you have scrolled up, and the "jump to latest" pill no longer overlaps the note input.

1.12.0 - 2026-06-30

Merging rejoined visits is now on by default. An accidental leave and rejoin of the same meeting is the common case, and merging is reversible (no content is lost), so it now happens out of the box. The merge window is also tightened to about 40 minutes (from 2 hours) so a persistent meeting "room" reused for a different, later call is not merged by mistake. Turn it off in Settings to keep one file per visit.

1.11.1 - 2026-06-30

Language prompt polish. The start-of-meeting language prompt no longer overlaps the in-meeting notices, closes as soon as you pick a language (in the prompt or via the pill), and applies your choice in one click: picking a language in its list is enough, with no extra confirm step. Also removed a hard-to-read header from the caption-language dropdown.

1.11.0 - 2026-06-30

Optional language prompt at meeting start. For people who meet in several languages and forget to switch: turn on "Ask which language to use at the start of each meeting" in Settings and a prompt appears as each meeting begins, letting you confirm or switch the caption language before it records in the wrong one. Off by default; it never interrupts recording, and has a "Don't ask again" link.

1.10.0 - 2026-06-30

Optionally merge rejoined visits into one file. If you accidentally leave and rejoin the same meeting within a couple of hours, the visits can be folded into a single .md instead of one file per visit. Off by default; enable "Merge rejoined visits into one file" in Settings. A daily recurring call (same link every day) is never merged across days, and a private visit is never folded into a public file. Each rejoin is marked in the file with a ## Visit N · rejoined … heading, and the History list shows the visit count.

1.9.0 - 2026-06-30

More reliable end-of-meeting saving. The transcript is now finalized from Google Meet's own call connection rather than only watching the on-screen "leave" button. Your meeting still saves if Meet changes its interface, and it saves a couple of seconds sooner when a call ends without you clicking Leave (you were removed, or the host ended the call). The previous on-screen checks stay in place as a backup, so nothing regresses.

1.8.0 - 2026-06-29

Friendlier saved file. The .md is now human-readable Markdown: a short header (title, meeting link, time, participants) followed by speaker turns as **Speaker** · time with the text as a quote. Machine metadata (schema, source, build) moved into a single trailing comment, out of the way.
Meeting link in the file. The header now carries the Google Meet join link.
Notes and bookmarks stand out. Recorder notes and bookmarks now render as their own ### heading blocks instead of speaker-style turns, so they stand apart in the transcript and no longer read as a participant.
Caption alternatives are now a setting. The raw caption versions (for recovering words the final caption dropped, or for an AI to reconstruct the exact wording) render as quoted ↳ _alt:_ lines under each turn. On by default; turn off in Settings for a cleaner file.

1.7.2 - 2026-06-29

Simpler in-meeting notices. The toasts and the Settings "meeting in progress" note now use a plain soft fill instead of an accent edge, and the language-change confirmation shows for 4 seconds.
Cleaner Help. The in-extension Help page now covers just how to use the extension; build and development notes moved out of it. The first-run welcome page also links to Help.

1.7.1 - 2026-06-29

More visible in-meeting notices. The "recording" and language-change toasts now use a soft accent style instead of plain black, and the Settings note shown while a meeting is recording is highlighted, so both are easier to spot. The language-change confirmation is also briefer (5 seconds).

1.7.0 - 2026-06-29

First-run setup. Installing the extension now opens a short welcome page to pick your default caption language before your first meeting.
Clearer caption-language scope. The in-meeting language picker spells out that a change applies to the current meeting only and confirms it with a brief notice, and the Settings page now points out, while a meeting is recording, that changing the default applies to new meetings rather than the one in progress.

1.6.3 - 2026-06-29

Back-to-back meetings are both saved. Leaving a call and then joining a different meeting in the same tab no longer loses the first one. Its transcript is now finalized to both the file and the meeting history before the next meeting can overwrite it.

1.6.2 - 2026-06-24

Leaner transcript files. Caption revisions that differ only in capitalization or punctuation are no longer saved as alt: lines; only genuine wording changes are kept, so the raw-versions section is much smaller.

1.6.1 - 2026-06-19

Re-joined meetings are recorded again. Leaving a call and quickly re-joining it in the same tab no longer drops the second visit; its transcript is saved to both the file and the meeting history.
More complete participant lists. People who were already in the call when recording began are no longer intermittently missing from the saved participants; the list is seeded from everyone known at join time.

1.6.0 - 2026-06-19

Decluttered popup. Clicking the toolbar icon now shows just what you reach for around a meeting: the "Hide all on-screen controls" toggle, a "Meeting history" button, and links to Settings and Help.
New Settings page. Caption language, folders, the private-by-default and debug-log options, and the docs links moved to a dedicated, easier-to-read settings page, opened from the popup or from the extension's options entry.
Refreshed look. A higher-contrast, Google Meet-native colour scheme across the popup, settings, and history, with a tuned dark theme.

1.5.0 - 2026-06-19

Read the docs inside the extension. The popup now links to Help, What's new (these release notes), and the Privacy policy.
Hardened the saved transcript. A multi-line chat message can no longer be shaped to look like a real speaker turn in the saved file, and two captions that land in the same instant keep their own alternatives.
Notes and bookmarks are saved reliably, including a meeting where you only dropped bookmarks and nothing was said.
Holding Alt+Shift+H / Alt+Shift+B no longer flickers the UI or drops a burst of duplicate bookmarks; the bookmark shortcut is now shown in the popup.

1.4.0 - 2026-06-19

Notes and bookmarks during a meeting. Jot a note or drop a timestamped bookmark while the call is happening; both appear in the live panel and in the saved transcript.
Search the live transcript from the in-meeting panel.
Hide all on-screen controls with one toggle, from the popup or with Alt+Shift+H (⌥⇧H on macOS) during a meeting. Handy for screen-sharing and demos; recording keeps running.
Sticky default caption language. New meetings start in your default; you can switch the language for the current meeting only from the in-meeting pill, and that one-off choice is not saved.

1.3.0 - 2026-06-19

New machine-oriented transcript format: structured front matter plus a clean body, easier to feed to downstream tools. The saved file now records the meeting language and who recorded it.
Extension icons, an explicit content-security-policy, and a one-command store-packaging build.
Privacy hardening: network reading is narrowed to only what speaker-name resolution needs, diagnostics no longer leak any transcript text into the page by default, and meetings you mark private are excluded from the debug log entirely.
Reliability: exports are crash-resumable, so a meeting is never silently lost if the browser restarts the extension mid-finalize; end-of-meeting handling was hardened.
The in-meeting privacy control is now a clear on/off switch that fills red when a meeting is private; the history list shows a dash for non-private meetings.

1.2.0 - 2026-06-18

Chat messages appear inline in the live transcript and the saved file. (Reliable capture of other participants' chat came later, in 1.13.0.)
Robust caption recovery when Meet's native captions are toggled off and on.
More reliable speaker names, for remote participants and yourself, preserved across a mid-meeting page reload.

1.1.0 - 2026-06-17

Speaker names resolved from the meeting roster.
Cleaner raw caption history (pure upper/lower-case flicker is collapsed).

1.0.0 - 2026-06-17

First stable release: live transcript plus in-meeting chat, saved locally as one Markdown file per meeting; a floating in-meeting transcript panel; a per-meeting privacy folder; a local history of recent meetings; and zero network, so nothing is ever uploaded.