Where are my meeting recordings stored?
On a company's servers. That is the answer for essentially every AI note taker you can buy, including Noter AI, and it follows directly from how these products work: the transcription and the summary are produced by models running in a data centre, so the audio has to travel there. The file may also sit on your phone, but the phone is not where the system of record lives. The useful version of this question is what happens to that audio afterwards, who can reach it, and whether you can get rid of it on demand.
Updated September 2026
The short answer
Cloud storage is the default, and there is no mainstream exception. No widely used meeting app runs a full transcription and summarisation stack offline on your device. If a tool syncs your notes between a phone and a tablet, or lets a teammate open a note, the audio and the text are on a server.
Your device usually holds a copy, not the original. Local files are there so playback is instant and so a recording survives a dropped connection. Deleting the app does not delete the account's data, which is the mistake people make most often.
Encryption in transit and at rest is the baseline you should expect. Noter AI does both. That protects the data from interception and from someone walking off with a disk. It does not, by itself, tell you how long the audio is kept or who inside the company can look at it.
Whether your content is used to train models is a separate question and a more consequential one. It has its own page: does an AI note taker train AI on your recordings. Noter AI does not train on your content.
Noter AI records, transcribes and summarizes your meetings on iPhone, iPad & Android, in 60+ languages.
Why the audio leaves your phone at all
It is reasonable to wonder why a modern phone cannot do this locally. It partly can, and the part it cannot do is the part you are paying for.
On-device speech recognition exists and is decent. Dictation on iOS handles short bursts of speech offline. It is tuned for a person speaking clearly and close to the microphone in one language.
A meeting is a much harder problem. Several voices at different distances, overlapping speech, background noise, speaker separation, mixed languages, and then a language model reading the whole transcript to work out what was decided and who owes what. That combination needs hardware you are not carrying.
Sync is the other reason. A note that exists only on the phone that recorded it will not appear on your iPad, and it goes with the handset if you lose it. Cloud storage is what makes a note portable between devices and recoverable afterwards.
So the trade is real and worth stating plainly. You get a quality of transcript and summary that a phone cannot produce on its own, and in exchange your audio is processed and stored by a vendor. If your work genuinely requires that recordings never leave the device, this whole category is the wrong tool and you want a local recorder with no AI layer.
The questions that actually matter
- How long is the audio kept after the transcript exists? Most policies govern audio and transcripts under separate rules. Some vendors delete audio once transcription completes; Granola does. Others keep it until you say otherwise.
- Can you delete it yourself, from the app, without emailing support? Some products only remove data on request, which means the timing is theirs to decide.
- Does deleting an account delete the data behind it? Ask this specifically. Account closure and data deletion are not always the same operation.
- Who else touches the data? The speech and language model providers behind any of these products are subprocessors. Their terms apply to your meeting too.
- Is it encrypted at rest, or only in transit? Encryption in transit protects the file while it travels to the server; encryption at rest protects it once it is sitting on a disk there. You want both.
- Can you get your content out? Export matters for storage questions, because being able to delete confidently depends on already having what you need somewhere else.
How to find out where a given app keeps your recordings
- 1Turn off wifi and cellular, then open an old note. If the transcript and audio still load, there is a local copy. If it needs a connection, you are looking at cloud-only storage with a cache.
- 2Record ten seconds with the device in airplane mode. If no transcript appears until you reconnect, transcription is server-side. That is the normal result and it tells you the audio is uploaded.
- 3Search the privacy policy for "retain", "storage" and "delete". Read the sentence about audio separately from the sentence about transcripts.
- 4Find the delete control in the app before you need it. Delete a single test note, then check whether it is gone on a second device. That confirms the deletion reached the server, and did not simply hide the item on the device in your hand.
- 5Find the account deletion control too, and check whether the policy says data is removed with it. Noter AI puts account and data deletion in the app.
- 6Export a note to PDF or Word and keep it somewhere you control. Anything you would be upset to lose should not exist only inside one vendor's account.
- 7Screenshot the policy page with the date if this matters for a client or an employer. Policies get revised without any announcement, and a dated screenshot is what you will want if anyone asks later.
What Noter AI gives you
Encrypted in transit and at rest. Your recordings and transcripts are protected on the way to the server and while they sit on it.
Cloud storage with sync across your devices. Record on your iPhone, read the note on your iPad, keep going on Android. The note follows the account, so losing a phone does not lose a meeting.
Sign in with Apple is supported, so you can create an account without handing over an email address you would rather not share.
Delete your account and all of its data at any time, from inside the app. No support ticket, no waiting period to negotiate.
Your content is not used to train AI models. Recordings and transcripts are processed to produce your note and nothing else.
Export before you delete. PDF, Word, plain text and rich-text copy, so the record you care about can live in your own filing system as well as in the app.
The honest limits. This is cloud storage, so your audio is uploaded and there is no offline transcription. There is no web or desktop app, so access is through the iPhone, iPad and Android apps. And this page deliberately does not quote a retention period or name infrastructure providers, because those specifics belong in the current privacy policy, where they stay up to date.
Frequently asked questions
Where are AI meeting recordings stored?
On the vendor's cloud servers, for essentially every AI note taker on the market. The audio is uploaded so that speech and language models can transcribe and summarise it, and the finished note is stored server-side so it can sync between your devices. Your phone typically keeps a local copy for fast playback, but that copy is not the system of record, which is why deleting the app does not delete your data.
Are meeting recordings stored on my phone or in the cloud?
Both, in most apps, with the cloud copy being the one that counts. A local file lets playback start instantly and protects a recording if your connection drops mid-upload. The server copy is what syncs to your other devices and what remains if you lose the phone. A quick test: open an old note in airplane mode. If it loads, there is a local copy; if it does not, storage is cloud-only with a cache.
Can I delete my meeting recordings permanently?
In Noter AI, yes. You can delete individual notes and you can delete your account and all of its data at any time from inside the app, without contacting support. Check this specifically for any tool you evaluate, because account closure and data deletion are sometimes different operations, and some products only offer deletion by request. Export anything you want to keep first, as PDF, Word or plain text.
Is my meeting audio encrypted?
In Noter AI it is encrypted in transit and at rest, meaning both on the way to the server and while stored there. That is the baseline to expect from any tool in this category, and it is worth confirming, since some policies only mention transit. Encryption protects against interception and against stolen hardware; it does not on its own answer how long audio is retained or whether staff can access it.
Can meeting recordings be stored only on my device?
Not with an AI note taker. Transcription, speaker separation and summarisation run on servers, so the audio has to be uploaded for the product to do anything. If your requirement is genuinely that recordings never leave the device, use a plain local voice recorder and accept that what you get is an audio file with nothing attached to it. That trade-off is the reason cloud processing is universal in this category.
Does deleting the app delete my recordings?
No. Removing an app from your phone deletes the local cache and your access, while the account and its data continue to exist on the vendor's servers. To actually remove your recordings you have to delete the notes, or delete the account, through a control the app provides. Noter AI offers account and data deletion in the app, and this is worth checking on any tool before you record anything sensitive.
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