How does Oyma automatically detect when a meeting starts and ends?

Active Hardware Monitoring vs. Invasive Calendar Scrapes

Many automated meeting assistants demand full read access to your Google Calendar or Microsoft Outlook accounts. They continuously scrape your private calendar events, attendee lists, client email addresses, and meeting agenda descriptions to predict when meetings happen.

Oyma rejects invasive calendar scraping. Instead, it relies on real-time CoreAudio hardware state monitoring.

How CoreAudio Call Detection Works

Behind the scenes, Oyma listens to low-level operating system notifications emitted by Apple’s CoreAudio daemon (coreaudiod):

[Zoom / Teams / Meet starts call]
               |
               v
  [CoreAudio: Mic Stream Activated]
               |
               v (< 50ms)
    [Oyma Audio Watcher Daemon]
               |
               v
  [Subtle Floating Toast: "Record Call?"]

1. Input Stream Engagement: When Zoom, Google Chrome, Microsoft Teams, or Slack opens an audio input stream on your microphone, CoreAudio fires an AudioHardwarePropertyListenerProc callback.
2. Process Attribution: Oyma checks the process identifier (PID) claiming the microphone to determine if it belongs to a recognized communication application.
3. Prompt or Auto-Record: Depending on your preferences, Oyma displays an elegant floating action prompt (⌘R to Record) or begins recording immediately.
4. Call Termination Sensing: When the call ends and the application closes its audio stream, Oyma detects the hardware deactivation and automatically stops the recording, initiating transcription.

Zero Calendar Permissions Required

Because call detection is rooted in hardware device states, you never have to grant Oyma access to your calendar, contacts, or emails. Spontaneous phone calls, ad-hoc Slack huddles, and unscheduled Google Meet sessions are detected with identical precision.

Privacy-Preserving Call Sensing Invariants

Many productivity utilities monitor your applications by running aggressive accessibility screen-scrapers or periodically polling system process tables.

Oyma enforces strict privacy invariants:

• Event-Driven Call Detection: Instead of continuously scanning running programs, Oyma registers a lightweight listener with CoreAudio that only wakes up when audio hardware state changes occur.
• Zero Audio Eavesdropping Before Recording: Oyma never buffers or listens to audio streams until you explicitly click Record or confirm the recording prompt.
• No Background Screen Capture: Meeting detection checks hardware audio engagement only, never capturing screenshots or inspecting screen contents without your knowledge.

Zero Calendar Access Required for Call Detection

Unlike cloud meeting notetakers that require read-write access to your Google or Outlook calendars, CoreAudio sensing requires zero calendar permissions. Unscheduled phone calls, ad-hoc Slack huddles, and impromptu discussions trigger detection with identical reliability.

The listener uses negligible CPU cycles (less than 0.01% idle CPU) because it is event-driven: it only executes code when macOS CoreAudio broadcasts an actual hardware state change event, ensuring battery life is unaffected.