What is the best AI tool for automatically transcribing and summarizing Zoom meetings
Otter.ai and Fireflies.ai are the top choices for automatically transcribing and summarizing Zoom meetings — both join calls as a bot, generate a full transcript in real time, and deliver an AI-written summary with action items within minutes of the call ending. Otter.ai has a more generous free tier, while Fireflies.ai integrates more broadly with CRMs and business tools.
Meeting transcription tools work by connecting to your Zoom account or dropping a bot into the call to capture audio in real time. The transcript is then processed through a large language model that identifies key decisions, action items, and topic summaries. You get a searchable record of every call without anyone having to take manual notes. Otter.ai is the most popular option for small teams. Its free plan includes 300 minutes of transcription per month and automatically highlights speaker turns, action items, and key phrases. Paid plans add longer recordings, team workspaces, and a native Zoom integration that auto-joins scheduled meetings without any manual setup. Fireflies.ai leans more toward sales and operations teams. It records, transcribes, and scores calls for talk ratio, sentiment, and topic coverage — useful if you're reviewing customer conversations or coaching staff. It connects directly to HubSpot, Salesforce, and Slack, so summaries and action items push straight into your existing workflow without copy-pasting. If you just need quick summaries without a persistent bot, Fathom is worth a look — it's free for individuals, records Zoom calls locally, and produces a concise shareable summary in one click. Teams already inside Microsoft 365 can skip third-party tools entirely: Microsoft Copilot does the same job natively within Teams meetings.