Every meeting app starts the same way: record, transcribe, summarize, done. That part is largely solved, and honestly Apple gives you most of it for free now. So I spent my time on what happens after the transcript exists.



Shoulder Surf, iOS, live today. Here's the actual list.



During the meeting: live on-device transcription. Speaker separation that works out who said what, also on-device, with no cap on how many people are in the room. Voice enrollment so it knows which one is you by name. Real-time AI answers in your ear through AirPods while people are still talking. Customizable one-tap prompts, so "what did I miss," "draft a reply," "what should I be asking" are single taps. Rolling summaries that build as the meeting goes. Camera capture for the stuff that never reaches the microphone, a slide, a whiteboard, a shared screen.



After the meeting: sentiment and urgency analysis with the reasoning shown, not just a score. Auto-suggested tags that tell you why they were suggested. Shareable meeting reports. Action items pushed into iOS Reminders. Chat with a single meeting and ask it anything about what happened.



Across meetings: projects that group related meetings. Project chat that answers across every meeting in the project at once, so "what did Dana commit to about the migration last month" is a question you can actually ask, and get an answer with the meeting it came from. Memory that carries decisions, commitments and people between meetings, so it knows who Kore is by the third call. Web search folded into answers when the question needs current information.



Here's the part I'd underline, because it's the real difference. Meeting chat and project chat aren't a menu of canned actions. They're an open prompt sitting on top of your meeting data, so you're not limited to whatever features I thought to build. Want the entire meeting translated into Swahili? Ask for it. Want the last six months of a project boiled into five bullet points for your boss, in her voice, as a Word document? Ask for that. Want to know every time someone mentioned a deadline and whether they hit it? That's a question, not a feature request. A notetaker gives you the three buttons it shipped with. This gives you whatever you can describe.



The Pro tier is where the document work lives. You can attach reference files to a question, a statement of work, a status report format, last quarter's deck, and have the answer built against them instead of from nothing. And it generates real files back: spreadsheets, Gantt charts, Word documents, presentations, PDFs, produced from the discussion and shareable straight out of the app. Pro doesn't meter how often you do that. The per-message limit is two files up to 25 MB each.



Getting things in and out: import recordings you already have, audio or video, including Meet, Teams and Webex exports, and it transcribes and separates speakers offline. Share any file into the app from anywhere in iOS. Send a whole meeting to another Shoulder Surf user. iCloud sync keeps your meetings current across your devices, and separately, iCloud Drive backup writes your audio and transcripts out as ordinary files organized by project. Not a proprietary blob, not an export you have to request. M4A and text sitting in the Files app, readable by anything, and they stay readable if you delete the app or if I get hit by a bus.



It behaves like an iOS app rather than a website in a wrapper. Say "start a meeting with Shoulder Surf" or "show my last meeting in Shoulder Surf" and Siri does it, no setup, and the same actions are available as Shortcuts you can chain into your own automations. Your meetings are indexed in Spotlight, so searching your phone's home screen for something someone said surfaces the meeting and opens straight to it. Action items land in the real Reminders app, not a to-do list I invented. The session lives in the Dynamic Island and on the Lock Screen while it runs. There's an Apple Watch app. And your data is on your iPhone, your iPad and your Watch, so you can start on one and read on another.



Model choice: Apple Intelligence on-device for free, our managed AI, or your own API key with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, DeepSeek, Moonshot, Alibaba or OpenRouter. Your choice per query, not per subscription."And that model list stays current, because it's served from my side rather than baked into the app: new models show up in the picker without waiting for an app update. Today that meant six additions in one pass: Claude Opus 5, OpenAI's new GPT-5.6 family (Sol, Terra and Luna), and Google's Gemini 3.6 Flash and 3.5 Flash Lite. Every one was tested against the provider's live API before it went in, because several of these new models quietly reject parameters the previous generation accepted, and finding that out is supposed to be my job, not your error message.



And the boring stuff that matters: English, Spanish and Japanese. No bot joins your call, nothing installs on your work machine, nothing shows up in a screen share. Delete your account and everything on our servers from inside the app.



Free tier is permanent, not a trial. Recording, transcription, speaker separation, import and sharing are unmetered and need no account at all, because they run on your phone and cost me nothing. Free accounts also get about five hours a month of the managed AI. Paid tiers exist if you want that unmetered, and I use Pro myself.



Requires iOS 26.



[https://apps.apple.com/app/id6760098225](https://apps.apple.com/app/id6760098225)



Full feature list and every supported model: [https://shouldersurf.com](https://shouldersurf.com)

Transcription is the easy part. It's everything after the transcript that took two years.