What is the best AI tool for transcribing and summarizing meeting notes
Otter.ai and Fireflies.ai are the top choices for most small businesses — both join your Zoom, Teams, or Google Meet calls automatically, transcribe in real time, and generate a summary with action items. Otter.ai has a more generous free tier; Fireflies.ai integrates more deeply with CRMs like HubSpot and Salesforce if you're in a sales workflow.
Before these tools existed, someone on the team had to either take notes the whole meeting or spend 30 minutes after the call writing them up from memory. AI meeting transcribers eliminate that entirely. They join as a bot participant, record audio, produce a searchable transcript, and — more importantly — extract the parts that actually matter: decisions made, action items, and who said what. Otter.ai is the go-to for teams that want something simple and cheap. The free plan gives you 300 minutes of transcription per month, which covers most small businesses. It syncs with Google Calendar and Outlook, so it can auto-join meetings without you thinking about it. The AI summary it generates isn't perfect, but it's good enough that most people stop taking manual notes within a week of using it. Fireflies.ai is the better pick if your team lives in a CRM. It pushes meeting summaries directly into HubSpot, Salesforce, or Notion, tags speakers, and lets you search across all your past meetings with a single query. The free plan is limited, but the Pro tier at $10/month per user is reasonable for sales teams where every call has follow-up tasks. For teams already embedded in Microsoft 365, Copilot in Teams now does this natively — no third-party bot required. If you're paying for a Microsoft 365 Business plan, check whether Copilot is already included before paying for a separate tool. The summary quality is comparable to Otter and Fireflies, and it stays inside your existing security perimeter, which matters for some industries.