I’m a man of simple needs. All I want is: when I’m on Google Meet, I turn on captions. I wanted to click a bookmarklet and save those captions into a local Markdown file. (So that an AI agent can guide me from it.)

Hence, Google Meet Captions. The code is in gmeetcaptions/. Drag the button to your bookmarks bar. Join a Meet. Turn on captions. Click it.

You get a tiny panel with two buttons: Copy and Start Recording.

The bookmarklet writes this kind of Markdown:

# Meeting title

- **Meeting code**: abc-defg-hij
- **Started**: 5/15/2026, 8:00:00 AM
- **Participants**: Alice, Bob, Carol

---

## Alice [0:12]

Good morning everyone.

## Bob [0:18]

Let's get started with the agenda.

That’s it. No server. No extension. No login. No API. Just a bookmarklet page, a script, and local browser APIs.

BUT: Google Meet captions are live and unstable.

A sentence may appear as:

mic, so,

Then a second later become:

mic, So that's a new person. Okay.

Then become:

mic, So that's a new person. Okay. Hey. oh, but,

If I simply append every change, the transcript becomes garbage. So the bookmarklet keeps updating the active speaker turn until it becomes stable. The implementation uses a MutationObserver plus a one-second polling fallback. After four unchanged polls, it treats the turn as final.

The tests are in gmeetcaptions.test.js, using an anonymized fixture at __fixtures__/captions-anonymized.html.

BUT #2: Google Meet’s DOM is not a public API. Class names like .nMcdL, .NWpY1d, and .ygicle can vanish overnight.

So the scraper first tries semantic and structural selectors:

  • [role="region"][aria-label="Captions"] for the captions region
  • img[data-iml] and googleusercontent.com avatars to identify caption items
  • the first <span> as the speaker
  • the last non-image <div> as the caption text

Only then does it fall back to obfuscated class names. That selector strategy is documented in the README.

Boring, but also the difference between “worked once” and “might work tomorrow.”

The weirdest was Chrome writing to a .md.crswap file while recording. The file appears unfinished until I click Stop Recording. Then Chrome finalizes it.

This is good, actually. It means the browser is safely streaming to a local file via the File System Access API. But it also means: stop the recorder before trusting the file!

I captured these bugs and prompts in prompts.md, because future-me will forget. Future-agent, too.

Why bother? Because transcripts are not the output. They are raw material.

Once a meeting is Markdown, I can ask agents to extract decisions, questions, follow-ups, contradictions, reusable prompts, and blog ideas. I can diff it. Search it. Commit it. Feed it to another workflow.

Meetings now become the “context” in context engineering!