For about six weeks I’ve had a Pocket recorder stuck to the back of my phone, and it has quietly become the thing I reach for most after the phone itself. It records conversations, turns them into transcripts, summaries, and action items, and since the Pocket MCP server shipped, Claude Code can read all of it. This post is how I actually use it: meetings, idea capture, and the logistics of running a life. I bought it with my own money, and the links to it are affiliate links.
What it is
Pocket is a small recorder made by HeyPocket. It attaches to a phone, records audio, and syncs to an app and a web dashboard where each recording gets a transcript, a summary, and a set of generated actions. There is also a desktop client that captures calls from your laptop, which is where most of my work meetings end up.
Recordings live in spaces and folders. I keep one space per work context and one for personal matters, with folders under them for recurring threads. That structure turns out to matter later, because the MCP server can scope a search to a folder.
Meetings
I’m a sales engineer. A normal day is four to seven calls, and the failure mode of that schedule is not forgetting the big commitments. It is forgetting the small ones: the doc link I said I’d send, the person I said I’d loop in, the follow-up I said I’d schedule for “later next week.”
Pocket’s action items are built for exactly that. After a call, the summary has a list of actions, each one typed as a reminder, a message draft, or an email draft. Each carries an assignee (me or someone else on the call), a priority, and a due date if the conversation implied one. Every action links back to the recording it came from, so when an item reads “send the link you mentioned,” I can jump to that moment in the transcript and see which link I meant.
Two things make this work better than a plain transcript service:
- Assignees. Half the actions on a customer call belong to other people. Seeing “them” and “me” split out is the difference between a list I can act on and a list I have to re-read.
- Drafts, not just reminders. For a promised follow-up, Pocket writes the first draft of the message in the voice of the call. I edit it, but I don’t start from a blank box.
The honest caveat: the summaries are good, not perfect. Speaker attribution slips when two people talk over each other, and a name spelled one way in the calendar shows up spelled another way in the transcript. I treat the actions as a checklist to verify, not a record.
Idea capture
I run a daily content pipeline, and the ideas for it show up at the wrong times: driving, walking the dog, halfway through someone else’s meeting. Before Pocket, those went into a notes app as three-word fragments I couldn’t decode a week later.
Now I tap the recorder and talk for ninety seconds. The transcript keeps the whole thought, the summary condenses it to a paragraph, and because it is searchable, a fragment I half remember (“the thing about agent tokens and audiences”) is findable a month later. Ideas that turn into real work get filed into a folder; the rest sit there costing nothing.
Personal logistics
This is the category I didn’t expect. The same tool that captures a customer call captures a call with a contractor, a school, a doctor’s office, or a mechanic. Those conversations produce exactly the same kind of small commitments as work calls, and I was worse at tracking them because nothing on the personal side had a CRM.
The reminders Pocket generates from those calls are the closest thing I have found to an assistant who was listening. “Call back Thursday after they check the part.” “Bring the form on the 15th.” I still move the ones that matter into my calendar, but I stopped losing them between the call and the calendar.
One rule I follow: I tell people when I’m recording. Most of my calls are video meetings that are already being recorded by the meeting software, so it rarely comes up, but in person I say it up front. Recording consent laws vary by state and country, and the tool doesn’t relieve you of knowing yours.
The MCP server
This is where it stopped being a gadget and became part of my toolchain. Pocket ships a remote MCP server at https://public.heypocketai.com/mcp. It supports OAuth, which is the path I used, or an API key sent as a Bearer pk_... header for clients that only take static headers.
Adding it to Claude Code is one command:
claude mcp add --transport http pocket https://public.heypocketai.com/mcp
The first tool call triggers the OAuth flow in a browser. After that, Claude Code has these tools:
| Tool | Plan |
|---|---|
| Search conversations (hybrid semantic and keyword) | Free and Pro |
| Search and update action items | Free and Pro |
| List folders and spaces with recording counts | Free and Pro |
| Fetch a full transcript with summary | Pro |
| Ask a natural-language question across all meetings | Pro |
What I do with it, in rough order of frequency:
- Drain the action list. “Show me my open Pocket action items from this week, grouped by who owns them.” Then I close them from the terminal as I work through them. Status changes sync back to the app.
- Pull context before a follow-up call. Search for the account’s folder, fetch the last transcript, and get a summary of what was promised and by whom. This used to be ten minutes of scrolling.
- Mine ideas for the content backlog. Search across recordings for the half-formed ideas, and feed the good ones into the pipeline.
The natural-language query tool is the one to be careful with. It synthesizes across every recording you have, which is powerful and also the reason to think about what you’re recording. I keep personal and work recordings in separate spaces and scope searches to a folder when the question is a work question.
One more note, since I write about MCP servers a lot: this one holds transcripts of every conversation I’ve recorded, which makes it the most sensitive server connected to my laptop. It uses OAuth rather than a long-lived key pasted into a config file, which is the right default, and Pro-only tools stay unavailable on a free account rather than failing open. If you run one of these on a work machine, it belongs on whatever inventory your team keeps of connected MCP servers. I wrote about why in Shadow MCP servers.
Would I buy it again
Yes. The recorder is the least interesting part. The value is that conversations I used to lose are now searchable, and the actions they implied are written down by something other than me. Plugging that into Claude Code through MCP is what moved it from useful to daily.
If you want one, this link is an affiliate link and I get a commission if you buy through it. Everything above is how I use mine.