Dictate — Record Categories (Quick vs Meeting): filter toggle + per-category sync

Status: Proposed · Owner: product/design · Phase 1 (this spec): list filter toggle + quick-copy scoping · Phase 2: per-category sync scope

Shipping now: the Meeting button and the All / Meetings / Quick filter are beta-channel chrome only. The normal channel is one dictation list until a stable meeting release.

Why #

Dictate captures two genuinely different things, but the UI conflates them:

• Quick records — hold Right Ctrl, speak, get text. Fast, high-volume, copy-and-paste. Stored in the rolling history collection; surfaced as the front-page quick-copy.
• Meetings — the Meeting button, a full recording, diarized into Speaker N segments with timestamps. Stored as note + segment. Heavier, fewer, reference material.

Today the dictations list (ui/src/views.jsx, "Search dictations") shows them together, the front-page quick-copy can be polluted by non-quick items, and sync is all-or-nothing. This also caused a real bug: a long quick dictation landed in history but the list reads note, so it looked "lost." Separating the two fixes that class of confusion.

The two categories #

Discriminator — derive, don't tag (decision) #

A record is a meeting iff it has segments: normalizeSegments(note.segments).length > 0; otherwise quick. This is already how the app decides diarized-vs-plain rendering (views.jsx/App.jsx), so it needs no new field and no migration. Revisit an explicit kind: "quick" | "meeting" only if we later need user-retagging (e.g. promoting a quick note to a meeting) — out of scope now.

Phase 1 — the filter toggle (the prototype) #

A 3-way segmented control in the dictations list header (notes-search row, top-right — where the close/notebook control sits):

[ All ][ Meetings ][ Quick ]

• Reuses the existing pill style (engine-opt/segment control used for English | Multilingual and Normal | Beta) — zero new visual language, per the house rule.
• View filter only. It does not change how you capture (hold = quick, Meeting = meeting stay orthogonal). It never mutates data.
• Persists the last choice as a UI pref (alongside ui-prefs.json), default All.
• Filtering runs before the existing search box, so search operates within the selected category.
• Empty states per filter: "No meetings yet." / "No quick records yet." / (existing) "Your notes will appear here" for All-empty; the no-search-results state is unchanged.
• Optional (nice-to-have): a small count next to each segment, e.g. Meetings · 12.

Quick-copy scoping #

The front-page quick-copy strip draws only from history (quick). A meeting never appears there. (Largely true already via the history source; make it explicit and add a test so a meeting can't leak in.)

Phase 2 — per-category sync scope #

Sync is already per-collection (history, note, segment, lexicon, settings), so scoping is a filter on which collections push, not new plumbing.

Sync scope setting:

• Placement (decision): the Sync row of the account panel — a compact selector shown where sync already lives. This is not a settings menu (the app deliberately has none; config is otherwise dictate config), just a contextual control on the thing it configures. Also settable via dictate config set sync-scope … for parity.
• Default Meetings only matches the intuition that meetings are the reference material worth carrying across devices, while quick records are local scratch.
• Changing scope is forward-only (doesn't retro-delete already-synced data); narrowing scope stops pushing that collection.

Behavior / edge details #

• Archived notes: the category filter applies to the active list; archive view (if any) is unaffected this phase.
• A quick record opened/expanded still renders as plain text; a meeting renders segments — unchanged.
• History entries surfaced in the list (via the history→note mapping in App.jsx) are quick (empty segments) and filter accordingly.

Testing #

• Filter: with a mix, All shows both; Meetings shows only segmented; Quick shows only non-segmented; counts correct; persistence across reload (mock pref).
• Quick-copy: a meeting is never offered as the front-page quick-copy.
• Phase 2: sync-scope=meetings pushes note/segment but not history; =everything includes history; =off pushes nothing; CLI parity.

Out of scope #

Retagging/moving records between categories; per-record sync opt-out; archive-view filtering; any capture-flow change.

Phase 1 (toggle + quick-copy scoping) prototyped in ui/src/views.jsx reusing the existing segmented-pill style; Phase 2 (sync scope) follows.