Best AI for meeting notes
Otter.ai joins your Zoom, Google Meet or Microsoft Teams call and turns the conversation into a searchable transcript with a summary and action items. You open the app before the meeting, let it record, then search past meetings later to find what was agreed. Some deeper features, like certain CRM integrations, sit on higher plans, but core transcription and notes work fine on the basic tiers.
Otter.ai is a voice-productivity platform that, in an April 2026 press release, repositioned itself from a passive meeting notetaker into an agentic Conversational Knowledge Engine, adding voice-activated AI agents for meetings, sales, and demos alongside its transcription roots.
Granola records audio from your own device instead of sending a bot into the call, so nothing visibly joins the meeting. You jot a few rough notes as you go, and it combines them with the transcript into structured notes and action items once the call ends. Because there's no visible bot, it's on you to let other participants know you're recording.
Granola is an AI notepad that transcribes meetings from your device's audio without a bot joining the call, then combines your rough notes and the transcript into structured notes, action items and follow-ups.
Fireflies.ai sends a bot into your meeting, transcribes it, and produces searchable notes and action items you can later ask questions about through its built-in assistant. It can also push details straight into your CRM or post them to Slack, which suits sales and customer-facing teams. Some of the deeper AI features draw from a limited monthly credit pool, so heavy use is worth keeping an eye on.
Fireflies.ai is an AI meeting assistant that records, transcribes and summarizes calls across Zoom, Google Meet, Teams and more.
What to choose
- 🎥Your team already meets on Zoom, Google Meet or Microsoft Teams and you want a bot that joins and transcribes automatically → Otter.ai
- 🤫You're in back-to-back meetings and don't want a bot visibly joining each call → Granola
- 📇You need meeting notes and action items to flow straight into your CRM or Slack → Fireflies.ai
- 🧑💻You're a developer who just needs raw speech-to-text to build your own tool on top of → Whisper
How to do it with AI
- Turn on the AI notetaker before the meeting starts, or let it join your call automatically.
- Hold the meeting on your usual video tool; most notetakers work with Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams.
- After the call, read the generated summary and action items carefully, since no tool catches every detail perfectly.
- Edit or add anything the AI missed, then share or export the notes to the people who need them.
- Search past meetings later instead of scrolling through old notes to find what was decided.
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