meeting-assistant/openspec/changes/add-transcription-pause-controls/proposal.md

Why

Transcript-inactivity notifications remain visible after transcription has resumed, and there is no way to intentionally suspend transcription during a break without ending the meeting and losing the active recognition session. Meeting Assistant should distinguish intentional pauses from accidental inactivity while preserving the meeting run and speaker context.

What Changes

• Dismiss every outstanding transcript-inactivity notification as soon as a new non-empty transcript segment is written.
• Allow an active meeting transcription to be paused and unpaused without ending the recording run, replacing captured audio with silence so paused audio is neither persisted nor sent to the transcription backend.
• Keep the active speech-recognition pipeline, including the Azure conversation transcriber session, run-local speaker mappings, artifacts, and normal finish/cancel controls intact across a pause.
• Suspend transcript-inactivity prompts and the ordinary inactivity stop while paused, but normally stop a meeting that remains continuously paused for four hours by default; restart inactivity timing when transcription is unpaused.
• Add Pause transcription / Unpause transcription to the active-recording tray menu and add Pause transcription to transcript-inactivity notifications.

Capabilities

New Capabilities

None.

Modified Capabilities

• meeting-recording: Add pause state and controls, intentional-pause inactivity behavior, and automatic dismissal of obsolete inactivity notifications.
• meeting-transcription: Preserve one streaming recognition session and speaker context while paused audio is replaced with silence.

Impact

• Affects recording status and coordinator behavior, inactivity prompt abstractions and the Windows toast implementation, tray menu modeling/rendering, and loopback status output.
• Affects the audio routed to temporary recordings, live speaker sampling, and configured streaming speech-recognition providers during an intentional pause.
• Adds one paused-session safety-timeout setting under the existing inactivity safeguard, adds no external dependency, and does not change normal finish, cancel/discard, profile-switch, or post-recording processing behavior.