The question every call ends with

Every call has the same moment near the end. Someone says something important ("OK, so Leo takes the API, Maja does the empty states, we ship Thursday"), and everyone nods. Then someone asks:

"Wait, is anyone writing this down?"

Nobody is. Or one poor person is, half-listening, typing "leo api thurs??" into a note they'll never find again.

We had that moment in our own calls so often that we built a small fix for it. We expected a nice-to-have. It turned out to be the thing people mention first when they tell someone else about Drum.

What happens when you invite Ringo

Ringo is Drum's AI teammate (you may have met him already). In a Jam, he's a note-taker. Here's the whole thing:

Press Invite Ringo. The pill sits right under the call controls, because inviting him is something you do to the call, like muting.
He pops in. A tiny pixel puff and he's standing on the control bar, notepad open, pencil going. Now and then he looks up at whoever's talking, blinks, and goes back to writing. (Yes, we animated the blinking. No, we won't apologise.)
Send him off with the same pill. He tucks the notepad under his arm, waves, and puffs out.
The notes land in the channel the Jam belongs to, a few seconds later, where everyone who was on the call (and everyone who wasn't) can read them.

If the call ends while he's still there, because the last person leaves or someone just closes the window, he wraps up and posts anyway.

Notes shaped like the call, not like a form

Most meeting notes look the same: Decisions. Action items. Open questions. Three headings, often two of them empty.

Ringo doesn't use a template. A five-minute catch-up gets two sentences. A planning call gets a short list of what was decided and who's doing what, with an @mention for each person who took something on and a date if anyone said one out loud. He's told to write only what was actually said: no invented decisions, no made-up owners, no deadlines nobody agreed to. And he's told to keep it short, because nobody wants notes longer than the call.

One more detail our Swedish half appreciates: whatever language you speak, the notes come out in English, with names and product terms kept exactly as they were said.

Why there's no bot in your call

You know the AI note-takers that join your meeting as an extra participant? A grey tile called "Notetaker", recording everyone, whether or not they agreed to it.

Ringo isn't a participant. Nothing joins the call. Here's what happens instead:

Each person's own app listens only to their own microphone while Ringo is in. That's why "who said what" is always right: the transcript is labelled by the device it came from, not guessed from voices.
Everyone decides for themselves. Being transcribed is its own permission. Drum asks you when you invite Ringo, or when he walks into a call you're already in. If you say no, your microphone simply isn't transcribed. You can change your mind any time in Settings.
Audio is never stored. Speech is sent in short chunks (silence is skipped) to Mistral's speech-to-text model on its EU endpoint, and only the text comes back.
The transcript is deleted as soon as the notes are posted. What stays is the notes, in your channel, like any other message.

And the calls themselves? We call them Jams.

Ringo needed somewhere to sit, so a word about Jams.

A Jam is a call that lives in a channel or a DM. Start one in #frontend and it belongs to #frontend: the notes, any sketches you make together, the whole context stays in one place, not scattered across a calendar invite and three tabs.

We worked hard on making them feel light:

Smooth, real-time audio and video over WebRTC, built on LiveKit. Jams open fullscreen, and the joining screen is fullscreen too, so connecting never jumps from a little card to the whole screen.
Cameras off when you join a channel Jam, because walking into a room of six people already on camera is the wrong default. A 1:1 opens with video, because you know who's there.

Screen sharing, raised hands and mute, all in one floating bar.
A background that's easy on your laptop. The animated green behind every Jam is a GPU shader, and calls already decode video, often on battery. So it stops entirely when the window is hidden, renders at about 1080p at most even on a 4K screen, and freezes to a single still frame if you've asked your computer to reduce motion.

It's a small surface, and we've tried to make every part of it feel quick.

A little thing that turned out to be a big thing

Here's what we didn't expect. The notes are nice, but the real change is what happens during the call.

When nobody has to write things down, everybody is actually in the conversation. The person who'd normally be typing gets to think out loud. People who couldn't make it read three lines in the channel later and are caught up. And the next-morning message, "wait, what did we decide?", stops showing up, because the answer is already in the channel, right under the call it came from.

It's a small rabbit with a notepad. It made our calls noticeably better.

Try it

Ringo is part of every Drum workspace on the Team plan ($5 per user per month). Start a Jam in any channel, press Invite Ringo, and let someone else do the remembering.

Who's writing this down?? Ringo is.