Taking a picture during a meeting without stopping the recording, and attaching any other file.
A meeting holds a recording, a transcript, a summary and notes — and files. The one that matters is a photograph taken during the meeting itself: a whiteboard, a slide, a document on the table.
The recording screen has a Photo or file button beside the timer (so named since build 238). Taking a photograph from it opens Chui's own viewfinder, and the recording does not stop. A red bar across the top of it shows the clock still counting and the level meter still moving, read from the recorder four times a second — if it ever stopped, that is where it would be visible.
It is Chui's own camera, not the phone's Camera app: the capture session it opens has no audio input and does not touch the audio session the recorder is using, so the microphone is never handed over. That is the whole reason the shutter exists as a feature rather than as a link to somewhere else.
A photograph taken this way is never saved to the phone's photo library. The copy kept with the meeting is the only one, so deleting it destroys it.
The shutter is offered on the iPhone and nowhere else, and that is the answer rather than a gap. On chui.io, on the Mac, on Windows and on Android, opening a camera cannot be promised not to interrupt the recording — so Chui does not offer one there. Those surfaces offer the file picker instead, which on a phone browser puts the camera one tap away through the operating system's own sheet, with Chui's recording untouched.
The meeting screen has a + at the end of the strip of files. It takes anything: a PDF, a slide deck, a scan, a photograph already in the library. It works on the phone, on chui.io, and in Chui for Mac and for Windows, where it opens the computer's own file chooser. On a computer the file is sent from where it is, and Chui never moves or deletes it.
Only the person who recorded the meeting can attach or remove a file. A colleague a meeting was shared with sees the same strip and can open what is on it.
A photograph of a whiteboard is often the densest thing that happened in the hour, so the summary is written from the files as well as from the words. A photograph is looked at by a model that can read images; a document goes in as its text. What they show is folded into the summary where it belongs — there is no «attachments» paragraph at the end, because a picture of a whiteboard holding three tasks belongs with the tasks.
The clock is what places a photograph. One taken at 10:41 is read against what was being said at 10:41, and lands on the bullet about that. A file attached before or after the meeting has no moment and is read as being about the meeting as a whole.
Chui says what it saw and nothing more. A picture it cannot make out — dark, blurred, out of focus — is left out of the summary rather than guessed at.
Not everything can be read, and nothing pretends otherwise. Photographs in JPEG, PNG or WebP, PDFs, and plain-text documents are read. A slide deck, a Word file, a spreadsheet, a zip or a video is stored and listed and nothing further is done with it — and a photograph taken on an iPhone and picked out of the library is usually HEIC, which is not read either. Chui's own shutter writes JPEG, so a picture taken during the meeting always is. Up to twelve files from any one meeting are read, oldest first, so the ones taken while it was running win over a folder attached afterwards.
This is why a file attached to a meeting is disclosed to a language-model Provider: the privacy policy says so at paragraph 3.1a, and chui.io/subprocessors names the category. It is not sent to a speech-to-text provider and it is not indexed for search.
A meeting that gains a photograph later can be summarised again. Ask for a new summary — resummarise_meeting() by typing — and it is written with the files the meeting holds now.
25 MB a file, 200 MB and 50 files a meeting. Past any of those, Chui says which one was reached and what is already held — it never fails silently. A photograph off a phone is 2–5 MB, so ten of them is about 40 MB.
Deleting a meeting destroys its files everywhere, including Chui's own storage, exactly as it destroys the recording. Removing one file asks first, and when it is a photograph Chui itself took, it says the thing nobody could guess: it was never in the phone's library, so that is the only copy.
A published meeting carries its files only at «everything», the level that also hands over the recording. At «summary» and at «transcript» they are not on the page and not fetchable from it — narrowing a link or stopping it stops them on the next request, like the recording.
list_attachments() says what a meeting holds, with how far into the recording each photograph was taken. add_attachment() attaches a small file — up to 2 MB, because the bytes travel through the conversation. prepare_remove_attachment() says which file would go and what it would cost, and remove_attachment() takes it away once you have said yes — two steps, like everything else that destroys something.
No assistant can press the shutter. Taking a photograph is something a person does with their hands, on their phone.