Recording a telehealth consult on Windows

This article is about the Windows desktop app. Help search is not filtered by platform, so it can reach you on an iPhone, an Android phone or the web; none of what follows applies there, and the Mac desktop app captures call audio a different way.

On Windows, Akoua records your microphone and the call separately. Your microphone is picked up the usual way. The call itself has to be captured from the application playing it, so Akoua asks which one before the consult starts.

Consent works exactly as it does everywhere else: nothing is captured until consent is confirmed in the product. See how consent works before a recording starts.

Choose what Akoua listens to

On the “Ready to record” screen, open Set up call audio and pick the application carrying the consult: Microsoft Teams, Zoom, your browser, whatever you are using. Two things worth knowing:

• The list includes applications that are running but silent, so you can set Akoua up before you join the call. That is the normal order of events.
• You can also choose everything this computer plays. That captures one output device rather than one application, so anything else playing through the same output is recorded too. Pick the specific application when you can.

If you pick the wrong row, you are not stuck with it. See “Changing the source mid-consult” below.

Use headphones

If the call plays through your speakers, your microphone hears the other person too. Both sides then arrive on both channels, and Akoua can no longer tell reliably who said what. Headphones keep the two apart.

This matters more on Windows than it might seem: it also affects the “everything this computer plays” option, because your own microphone is still recording the room while the speakers play the call back into it.

If the other person is missing from the transcript

If you are using the Microsoft Teams desktop application, start there. We have measured it handing Akoua digital silence instead of the call, while the call was audible and Windows itself showed the app producing sound. When that happens there is nothing on screen to distinguish it from a call where the other person simply has not spoken.

It is intermittent, not universal. The same machine and the same meeting can work perfectly one moment and deliver silence the next, and we do not yet know why.

What to do:

1. Run the consult in a browser tab instead. Teams in Edge or Chrome captured reliably in our testing, and it is the first thing we would try.
2. Or change the source mid-consult to “everything this computer plays”, which captures the call whatever application is producing it.

We have not seen this with Zoom or with browser-based calls. If you are not using the Teams desktop app and the other person is still missing, change the source with the picker and tell us: this is not the only thing that can cause it.

Changing the source mid-consult

You do not have to stop the recording to fix call audio. While a telehealth consult is running, the recording screen names the source it is currently listening to and offers a picker to change it, on both the full screen and the compact view.

Two things happen when you change it:

• There is a brief break in the call audio while Akoua stops one source and starts the other. Your microphone keeps recording throughout.
• Akoua writes a line into the transcript at the point where the change happened, and shows a notice on the review screen afterwards. That is deliberate. Everything recorded before the change may be missing the other person entirely, and a note drafted from a transcript that reads continuously across that boundary would imply the patient was audible the whole time. Listen back to the earlier part before relying on it.

“No call audio detected”

Akoua watches the call side and says so when it hears nothing for several seconds. A natural pause in the consult is enough to raise it, and it clears on its own as soon as the other person speaks.

Treat it as a prompt to check rather than proof of a fault. If it appears and does not clear once the other person is clearly talking, the source is not delivering audio: change it using the picker.

“Everything this computer plays”

This option captures one output device rather than one application. It is the reliable fallback when a specific application will not deliver audio, with two caveats:

• It captures everything else on that output. Notification sounds, a video in another tab, music: anything playing through the same output is recorded as though it were the consult. Sound sent to a different output is not, so if the consult is on your headset, what is playing through the speakers is not part of the recording.
• Muting that output stops it. Turning the volume down is fine and capture continues, but muting ends it, because there is no longer anything being played to capture. If you need silence in the room, use headphones rather than mute.

Which output Akoua captures is not a guess. Windows keeps a separate “communications” device, which is where it sends calls when you have a headset connected, and Akoua follows that device first when it is carrying sound. So a consult on a headset is captured, and the speakers are left alone.

What this does not change

Recording on Windows is subject to the same consent, storage and processing rules as every other surface, and the same disclosure appears on the note. Akoua is a documentation aid, not a diagnostic device, and it makes no clinical inferences. You remain responsible for using it within your own clinical governance and professional obligations.