How to Use Pastok for What You Actually Need Back

Nothing, really. You tap record on the Watch and talk. If you would rather not hunt through an app list while someone is mid-sentence, putting Pastok on your Watch face as a complication makes that one tap, but it is a convenience rather than a requirement.

Nothing starts on its own, ever. You start it, and after that the session runs passively until you stop it. There is no app-imposed time limit, so the ceiling is the Watch battery rather than a timer. That is why a five-hour meeting or a day of flat viewings works at all.

The Watch uploads as it records rather than relaying through your iPhone. So a phone that is off, dead, or in another room costs you nothing. Anything not yet sent waits on the Watch and goes up once it is charged and back online.

A summary, the commitments you made out loud, and the things worth a second look. None of it needs a prompt, and the summary does not wait for you to stop.

Processing is streaming, so the summary builds during the session, minutes behind what is being said rather than sentence by sentence. The transcript runs ahead of the summary. If a call takes the microphone, you get a notification so you can resume while the conversation is still happening.

What you open afterwards is a report. Activity is the timeline of what happened and the section people actually read; Action Board collects the commitments you made out loud, with reminders that carry the context they came from; Communication, Highlights and Reflection sit alongside them. Memory feeds all of it, so what arrives leads with what you have already shown you care about.

What Pastok will not do is act on any of it. It surfaces the commitment. Nothing gets emailed, no tracker gets updated, no meeting gets booked.

Chat, for anything you want to trace or look up. The verbatim transcript and export live at app.pastok.com.

The summary is the top layer, and everything under it is reachable by asking rather than by scrolling. These are the four things our own users ask for most often, in their own situations:

Verbatim words are a different surface. The full transcript and transcript export live on the web app, not in the iOS app. That is the single thing new users most often assume is missing. Speakers are separated there in a multi-person conversation, but they arrive as anonymous IDs rather than names — Pastok has no way to know that ID 2 is your manager, and overlap or a noisy room degrades the split.

An MCP server is coming soon. Until it ships, that export is the route into another tool, and some users paste an Activity straight into a coding agent.

Ask for it in plain words. There is no prompt technique to learn, and nothing to edit.

The stored transcript is not an editable document, so you do not fix it — you ask for the shape you wanted:

• "Turn this into decisions, owners, and open questions."
• "Turn the trip into a guide I can send a friend."
• "Lay the day out in order, as something I could cut a video from."

One sentence is enough. When a format looks like something you will want again, Pastok offers to keep it as a Skill, so the next one is produced rather than requested.

Skills. They are the only thing here that produces output on their own.

A Skill is written in Chat in one plain sentence, the way you would ask a person, and refined there when the output is not what you meant. Correcting the instruction is the most common thing users do in Chat, so expect the first version to be roughly right rather than right. There are three ways one can fire:

Output is Markdown or PDF, stored in your sandbox filesystem and managed by talking to Chat about it. A Skill's output can also go into a custom diary section, which puts it inside the report you already open each day instead of in a file you have to remember to look at.

This is the one surface that reads across sessions and produces output by itself. A meeting recorder's automation, where it has any, looks at the recording in front of it. A standing instruction that sweeps a week is a different thing.

Search by meaning. Not by remembering the words you used.

Semantic search runs across your past conversations, so "the pricing objection from the enterprise call" finds the session even when nobody said that phrase. Chat answers questions over that history, and can research something externally while holding the context of the conversation you actually had.

This is the part people mean when they say second brain. The usual second-brain stack assumes you type — Obsidian, Notion, a note you sit down to write. Spoken input breaks that assumption, because nothing gets filed at the moment it happens. So the filing has to be retroactive and the retrieval has to work on meaning. What a useful spoken note has to contain, tool-agnostically, is its own page.

Reflection and custom diary sections hold it. A scheduled Skill turns it into a habit.

Those are the surfaces for this. A scheduled Skill is what makes it a habit rather than an intention. The users who do this tend to talk it out while moving, after a tennis session or on a walk home. Then a Skill set to run on Sunday evening produces the weekly read, and that is what they come back to rather than the individual entries.

To be clear about what this is not — Pastok is not a journaling app in the sense of sitting down to write an entry. You never type. What you get is a record built out of talking, plus whatever standing instruction you left about how to summarise it.

Six things, listed in one place so none of them is a surprise later.

• Capture needs an Apple Watch. There is no phone-only mode, and Android is not supported.
• It will not join a Zoom, Meet, or Teams call as a bot.
• It cannot tap phone-call audio, because iOS hands that stream to nobody. Speakerphone is room audio, and that it can capture.
• Speakers are anonymous IDs, never names, with no attribution guarantee.
• Raw audio is deleted after processing and, by default, kept no more than 7 days. Transcripts and generated content stay.
• Skills produce documents. They never send, book, or update anything outside Pastok.