Orca Notes · The second brain · Mac and Windows
Everything you've written down, where Orca can reach it.
Orca Notes is the second brain inside Orca. Point it at a mailbox, your Fireflies meetings, a folder of markdown or the transcripts off your recorder, and it files what it finds overnight. Then search it by what you meant rather than the exact words, and let the meeting briefs and the people panel draw on it without you lifting a finger.
Orca Notes is a tab inside Orca, included in the licence. Every source has its own switch. The local folder crawler is optional and installs from Settings when you want it.
Choose the sources. The filing happens overnight.
A note you have to file yourself is a note you will not file. So Orca does the filing, and you do the choosing.
Pick what feeds it
Settings, then Notes sources. Add a mailbox and it is read overnight and every thirty minutes, ninety days back on the first run. Paste a Fireflies key and your meetings come in. Each source has an on and off switch.
Add the crawler, if you want it
An optional local watcher for a recorder transcript folder and any number of markdown folders. It ships inside the app, installs from the same settings screen, and runs quietly in the background from then on.
Search by meaning
Ask for "the retainer conversation" and get the transcript where nobody said the word retainer. Every result carries a text score and a meaning score, combined, so the exact phrase still wins when you have it.
The local crawler
Your folders, watched. Your files, left alone.
The crawler scans everything once, then watches for changes. Each new or edited file is copied into your Orca vault with a note on where it came from, marked read-only, and sent up to be filed and made searchable. Files it has already seen and that have not changed are skipped. Delete a file and its note is archived rather than lost.
- Markdown and text only. .md and .txt, up to 512 KB each. It is for notes, not for your whole disk.
- Recorder transcripts understood. Point it at the folder your recorder drops into and the file names become a date and a title.
- Read-only where it came from. Notes from a mailbox, a transcript or a folder cannot be edited inside Orca. The ones you write in the Notes tab can.
Where it gets used
Notes you never open, doing work anyway.
In the meeting brief. Every brief gets a "From your notes" section: the notes linked to the people in the room. It is private, written for you, and never pushed into the shared calendar event.
Beside the email. Open a thread and the person card in the reading pane searches your notes for them, alongside what you owe each other. Same in the calendar when you open an event.
In the Inbox tab. Everything captured, from the desktop, the web, the phone or over MCP, shows up with a summary, tags and a recall card: what it relates to, and up to five matches. Set how strict the recall is. The 06:30 digest then picks out the theme and the people you are about to see.
Keys you already hold. Failures you can see.
A second brain is only useful if you trust where it lives and notice when it stops. Both are built in.
Your keys, your vault
The Claude key you already gave Orca is reused for filing, summaries and answers, copied across only when you press the button. The embedding key is provided by Orca, with your own as an optional override. Fireflies is the key you already entered. All of them sit in your own Supabase vault.
Silent failures made visible
A strip of chips shows every source: last run, or "never", disabled if you turned it off, and the last error if there was one. A crawler that stopped a week ago is a problem you can see, not one you find out about in a meeting.
Off where it should be
Reading your clipboard and the text in your Orca Snap screenshots is a real option, and it is off by default. Turn it on and it runs once a night, at 01:30, with its own switch to turn it back off.
How it fits
Notes is the memory. These are the parts that use it.
Orca Notes is a part of Orca, the assistant that already runs your inbox, calendar and meetings. It feeds the parts below and is fed by them.
Pricing
Included in the Orca licence.
£250/licence/month
Everything included, Claude usage too
- No separate purchase
- Claude usage included, with a fair-use ceiling
- Yours while the licence is active
One licence, the whole assistant
This page is one part of it. Every part below comes with the same licence.
- Orca Inbox
- Orca Autopilot
- Orca Calendar
- Orca Book
- Orca Meet
- Orca Post
- Orca Brief
- Orca Notes You are here
- Orca People
- Orca Chat
- Orca Plan
- Orca Clip
- Orca Mobile
- Orca Today
- Orca Screen recording storage
Claude API usage, setup support and updates are in the monthly price. The pricing page has the one-off setup fee and the rate for six licences or more.
Also available: Orca Time, £2.79 per seat a month, with Orca Snap included.
Questions: chris@simmance.ai.
The questions people ask first.
Do I have to install the crawler?
No. Mailboxes and Fireflies are read in the cloud without it. The crawler is only for folders on your Mac: markdown notes and recorder transcripts. Install it from Settings when you want those in.
What does "search by meaning" actually mean?
Each note is turned into an embedding, a numerical fingerprint of what it is about, and your query gets the same treatment. Results are ranked on how close the two are, combined with an ordinary text match. So a note about "holding the fee flat" turns up when you search for "pricing", and the exact phrase still ranks first when you type it.
Can I write notes in it directly?
Yes, in markdown, in the Notes tab. Those are the ones you can edit later. Notes that came in from a source are read-only, so the record stays the record.
Can I capture from my phone?
Yes. The phone app sends its captures into the same Inbox, and so does anything you save over MCP from another tool.
Whose keys does it use?
Yours. The Claude key already in Orca, the Fireflies key you already entered, and an embedding key Orca provides unless you would rather use your own. They are stored in your own vault.
Stop looking for the note.
Orca Notes is part of Orca · Mac and Windows | Also see Orca Meet, Orca Chat and Orca People