What is the best AI tool to automatically summarize meeting notes
Otter.ai and Fireflies.ai are the top choices — both join your video calls automatically, transcribe in real time, and produce summaries with action items within minutes of the meeting ending. For small teams on a budget, Fathom offers a generous free tier with the same core functionality.
Manual note-taking during meetings splits your attention and leaves gaps. AI meeting assistants solve this by joining as a silent participant — they record audio, transcribe speech with speaker labels, and then run the transcript through a language model to pull out key decisions, action items, and a brief summary you can share immediately after the call. Otter.ai is the most established option and works natively with Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams. Its free plan covers 300 minutes of transcription per month, which is plenty for small teams holding a few meetings a week. The paid tier adds live summary cards that update in real time during the call — useful if you're presenting and want a running digest for attendees. Fireflies.ai takes a slightly different angle: it emphasizes searchability and CRM integration. Every meeting gets indexed so you can search across months of call history by keyword, topic, or speaker. If your team uses HubSpot or Salesforce, Fireflies can push call notes directly into contact records — a real time-saver for sales and client-services workflows. Fathom is worth flagging for bootstrapped teams: it's free for unlimited meetings on a single account, with no paywall on core summarization. The summaries are clean and structured, and it handles multi-speaker conversations accurately. If your needs are straightforward — join calls, get a summary, move on — Fathom covers most small business use cases at zero cost.