23 · Second Chair, the meeting app
Second Chair is where the meetings happen. The platform holds your contracts and what they are worth; this app sits beside the calls where those numbers are decided, and it is built so a negotiation can be prepared, run, and written up without opening the website at all.
It is an early preview, and every screen says so where something is not live yet.
The window
Four parts, and they do not move.
- The rail, far left: today, the library, search, and settings at the foot with the running version under it. If you ever wonder which build you are in, it is written there.
- The docket, the column beside it: your meetings, each with the renewal it matches in your estate. Sample until a calendar is connected, and labelled as sample until then.
- The middle: the prep, the context sheet, your notepad, and the minutes once they exist.
- The Line, right: what to say next while the call runs.
- The status bar, along the bottom: what is being captured, whether the seat is in the meeting, whether the local store is healthy, and the keyboard hints. If something is degraded it says so there first.
Ctrl K opens the command palette, which reaches everything on this page.
The first run
Three steps, shown once and re-runnable from settings or the palette: sign in with your platform account, connect a calendar, and test that the app can hear your speakers. Each step reports its own state rather than asking you to trust it, and the capture test prints the sample rate and level it actually heard.
Signing in without a password. Under the sign in button is Sign in without a password, with a link or your company SSO. Press it and the app shows a short code and opens your browser at the approval page. Sign in there however your workspace does it, confirm the code, and this window signs itself in. The code lasts ten minutes and works once. If your workspace requires SSO this is the way in: a password is refused there, on the website and in the app alike.
Connecting your calendar
Everything time-shaped depends on this. Press Connect a calendar in setup or in settings and the platform's Profile page opens in your browser, because Google and Microsoft refuse to run their consent screen inside an app window. The app notices when you come back.
Once connected: your real meetings replace the sample, each one matched to the vendor and renewal it belongs to, the prep can read your own paper, and the pre-meeting card can appear.
Preparing Vera
The context sheet carries the same fields as the call room, so nothing is lost by working here instead.
- Goal, Context and Your questions — what you want, what she should know walking in, and what must be answered before the call ends.
- Vendor and Vera's expertise — who you are meeting, and which vendor specialist she should be.
- What this call is for — a named objective (hold the uplift down, improve the discount, trade term for rate, and the rest) with the number it needs.
- Vera's job — listen and take notes, answer when asked, watch for the plays, argue the numbers, or ask the questions.
- Stance — assertive, balanced, or supportive.
- Who is in the room — seat by seat on both sides, with optional names and LinkedIn profiles.
- Documents — drag up to twelve PDF or DOCX files from anywhere onto the window, or take them out of your own document store (below).
The lists come from the platform itself, so a new objective or seat type appears here the day it appears on the site. Everything you set rides into the prep, into The Line, and into the seat.
The paper in front of her
A document you attach is read, not just listed. Each row says where it is up to: reading, then she can read it, or a plain reason it could not be. Only rows that say she can read it reach her.
What she does with it. The text rides into the prep, into the coaching while the call runs, and into the seat when you send her in. That is what lets her say what the order form actually says rather than what your estate record remembers, and she is told which of the two she is reading from when they disagree. A document too long to carry whole is marked as shown in part, and she is instructed to say nothing about the rest of it, so she can never answer about a clause she was not shown.
PDF and DOCX only, because those are the two the reader can take text out of. A scan with no text layer needs OCR, which the app does not do yet, and it says so rather than filing an empty document.
From your own document store. If your workspace has connected Google Drive, SharePoint or Box under Settings, Integrations, the chips under the document list open the folder it connected: filter by name, press Put in front of her, and the document joins the list without touching your laptop. The connection is org level and points at one folder, chosen by an owner, so this is your workspace's document folder rather than your whole personal drive. A store nobody has connected says so on the chip.
What is kept. Nothing. The file travels once, the text is taken out of it, and the bytes are deleted in the same request. A document you showed Vera does not become a contract in your archive: showing her the vendor's draft is not accepting it, and filing it on your behalf would put paper in your estate you never chose to keep.
The half hour warning
Thirty minutes before a meeting that has nothing set, a card appears: Vera has no goal or questions for this one yet. Press Brief her and the app comes forward with the context sheet open on that meeting; press Skip and it never asks again for it. It only appears when the sheet is genuinely empty, so a meeting you have already prepared is left alone. Switch it off under Settings, Meetings.
Before this one: the shelf
When the invite names a vendor the app already knows, a row appears above the prep with what the house has published about them: films to watch and briefs to read, each one opening on the platform. It is drawn from the research library and nothing in it is generated, so an unknown vendor shows an empty shelf rather than an invented one.
Have her read up
The prep is five sentences. Research it, above the shelf, is the other thing: type what you want found out and she writes a brief you can read before the call. Eight to fourteen hundred words on what you are walking into, how they sell, the levers that work on them, what they will try, and what to ask for in order.
Four sources, and it tells you which is which. Your own paper for that vendor, what your last calls with them established, the house corpus, and a live read of the public record. Every claim is attributed in passing, because a brief that mixes "your contract says" with "the internet says" is worse than either alone. Where two disagree it says so; where nothing answers a question that matters it says that too, and names what to ask the vendor for in writing.
It takes a couple of minutes and it is saved to your workspace, not just shown.
The prep
A meeting matched to a vendor in your estate preps itself: the app reads your own agreements for that vendor, what your last calls established, and the house negotiation corpus, and writes a sixty second read. It never invents a figure. Where your paper is silent it says so and names what to ask the vendor for in writing. Press read again after changing your goal.
Recording, and what it hears
It records every meeting by default. The recorder starts on its own at the top of any meeting with two or more people, and on any call it notices that nobody scheduled. It stops when the meeting's own end time passes, or when the call window closes. Joining an hour late does not start an hour of recording: if the meeting began more than five minutes ago it is left alone, and you can still press Record yourself.
Switch it off under Settings, Meetings and nothing is captured unless you press Record.
One thing this app does not decide for you. Whether everyone on a call has to be told it is being recorded depends on where you and they are sitting. Some places require it. The app records what you tell it to and says so plainly on screen while it does; the rest is yours.
Record meeting captures the call from your own machine: whatever your speakers or headset play, with no bot in the meeting and nothing to pick. With a microphone present your voice is captured as a separate channel, which is what lets the minutes tell you apart from them; without one it records their side only and the row says so.
The app also notices a call nobody scheduled — Zoom, Teams, Google Meet, Webex or a Slack huddle running on this machine — and offers once to capture it. It reads visible window titles only, never audio, and nothing about that leaves the machine.
The Line
While you record, the call is transcribed in near real time and the right pane works for you: at most one thing worth saying now, drawn only from what was said and what you set in the sheet, with your points to land struck through as the conversation covers them. It never repeats itself and stays quiet while you are carrying the call.
The minutes
Enhance notes turns your bullets and the recording into minutes. Your notes are the signal for what mattered; the transcript is the evidence.
Recipes decide the shape. A renewal negotiation reads as where it landed, their position and what moved, concessions given and taken, and the leverage still unused; a quarterly review reads against the commitments; an escalation reads as what they committed to and by when. Seven shapes ship, picked in the meeting header.
File to the deal shares the minutes with your workspace and puts them on the vendor's timeline, which is what makes the next meeting's prep know this one happened. The audio stays on your machine.
Talking to Vera
Talk to Vera in the right pane opens a private voice conversation about the meeting in front of you. She is not in the call and the other side never hears her: this is you and her, out loud, working through what you are about to walk into.
She starts already briefed. Your goal, the objective and its number, your stance, the questions you wrote, the context you set and the prep the app wrote for this vendor all reach her before she speaks, along with the notes you have taken so far. Ask her what to open with, what to do if they refuse, what a number really means, or to argue the vendor's side back at you.
Type instead of speaking whenever you prefer, or when the machine has no microphone. The box under the transcript sends a written question and she answers it out loud exactly as if it had been spoken. Mute me stops her hearing you without ending the conversation, Stop her cuts her off mid sentence, and End closes the line.
One caution, and the app states it too. She speaks through this machine's speakers. If you are already in a call with a recording running, her voice lands on the call's own track and the people you are meeting may hear it, so mute yourself in the meeting first. Before the call and after it, there is nothing to be careful about.
The conversation is not filed. Nothing from it enters the minutes or the library, and it does not spend the meeting seat's minutes; it draws on your workspace's voice allowance instead.
When the meeting ends
The minutes write themselves. Stop the recording and the memo is written straight away, then a window opens with it. Waiting for a press was the wrong default: the end of a call is the one moment you still remember what mattered and have not yet moved on. Switch it off under Settings, Meetings and the minutes wait for Enhance as before.
Send them from that window. Your workspace appears as a row of names to tap, and anyone else is typed in, comma separated. Replies come back to you, not to us. Your calendar gives this app the domains of the people in a meeting and never an address book, so the vendor's own people are typed by hand; that is a small cost and an honest one.
Vera never sends. She has no send tool in a meeting and never will: a vendor who asks her to mail the notes around is declined. This window is the other half of that rule, the person who owns the notes deciding afterwards, by hand.
Seating Vera in the meeting
Press Seat Vera and she joins the call as a named participant on Zoom, Teams, Meet or Webex and announces herself. Choose her role first: take notes, answer when asked, explain the detail, or negotiate for us.
While she is seated her transcript becomes the meeting's transcript with everyone's name on it, and The Line coaches from that. Let her speak releases one bounded statement, optionally answering a question you type. Mute her cuts her mid-sentence. Take her out ends the seat. Your goal, questions and context ride with her; your walk-away never does.
Her time is bounded by your workspace's allowance, which settings states before a meeting rather than leaving you to discover it inside one.
The library
Every meeting your workspace has filed, newest first, searchable by vendor, by a number, or by a phrase somebody said. Open a row to read the full minutes, yours or a colleague's. Ask puts a question across all of it and answers with the meetings it used, cited by vendor and date.
Filed memos are shared with the workspace; recordings stay on the machine that made them.
Bringing your old notes in
Meeting notes you already wrote somewhere else belong in the same library as the ones this app writes. Open Settings, find Bring your old notes in, press Import notes, then drop the exported files, or the folder holding them, anywhere on the window. Markdown and plain text, up to 300 at a time.
Export first, from whatever you used. Granola, Notion, Obsidian and the rest all export text; the app reads the files off your disk and never asks for an account or a token anywhere else.
A note that names a vendor you already track is filed against that vendor, so the next prep for them knows the conversation happened. A note that names nobody still files, under no vendor, rather than being guessed at. Nothing is rewritten: the note is filed as you wrote it, and no model runs on the way in. A very long note keeps its first 20,000 characters, about 3,000 words, which is longer than any set of meeting notes and shorter than a full transcript.
On a Mac
A universal build runs on Apple silicon and Intel, macOS 13 Ventura and later. Download it from the desktop app page.
The first open is refused. The build is not signed by Apple yet, so Gatekeeper says it cannot be verified. Open the Applications folder, right click Second Chair, choose Open, then confirm. Once only.
It asks for Screen Recording permission, and that is how a Mac hears a call. macOS has no loopback device, so the only supported way to capture what your speakers are playing is the framework screen recorders use. Nothing about your screen is read, kept or sent anywhere: the video frames are discarded the instant they arrive and only the audio is written. Grant it under System Settings, Privacy and Security, Screen and System Audio Recording.
One difference from Windows. A Mac records the far side of the call in mono, everything you hear, and not your own microphone as a second channel. The prep, the coaching, the minutes, the library and the seat all work exactly the same; what is missing is the speaker split that tells your voice from theirs in the transcript. Windows keeps both because it has a loopback device and a microphone at once, and the Mac equivalent needs a newer macOS than the audio tap does.
What it keeps
Recordings live on your machine. Settings carries a retention dial (forever, ninety, thirty or seven days) which sweeps on the spot and again at every launch, removing the file and its row together. A switch leaves internal meetings alone, so nothing is offered when everyone in the meeting shares your email domain. The platform deletes its own copy of any audio the moment the transcript exists.
Keeping current
The app checks for its own updates shortly after launch and every six hours, and installs them quietly. Windows shows "Windows protected your PC" on first install because the installer is not yet signed by a certificate in the company's name; choose More info, then Run anyway.
What is not there yet
Said plainly, because a preview that hides its edges wastes your time:
- The Mac build is new and lightly travelled. It is built and downloadable, and it records the far side only (above). Tell us what breaks.
- Scanned documents. A PDF with no text layer cannot be read. OCR is not in the app.
- Signing. Until the certificate lands, expect the SmartScreen warning on first install.
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