Learn the benefits of using AI to transcribe meetings and summarize information, so you can automate note-taking with AI Companion.
8 min read
Updated on March 13, 2025
Published on March 13, 2025
If you’ve ever been assigned to take notes in a meeting, you know the struggles. You’re trying to write down what every person said accurately, but if your attention shifts for just a moment, you might miss an important detail. It’s harder to participate in the discussion fully if you’re occupied with listening and typing. Then after your meeting, you need to clean up your notes, capture crucial next steps, and send your summary to the rest of the team. All these tasks eat away at your ability to be productive and can stop collaboration in its tracks. But help is at hand: an AI note-taker is just the tool you need.
Many people are turning to AI meeting apps and tools to automate note-taking and summarize meeting information. It’s like having an AI assistant by your side during meetings, taking notes and keeping track of discussion items so you can focus on the conversation. Not to mention, having a meeting summary with key points to refer back to makes writing that follow-up email much easier.
See how you can benefit from an AI note-taking tool — and why it just might become your new best friend in meetings.
Generative AI models are perhaps best known for generating messages based on a prompt, but they’re also great at summarizing information. They use natural language processing (NLP) to synthesize longer messages into short summaries that include key points about the text.
An AI notetaker transcribes a meeting conversation and uses the transcript as the text input to generate a meeting summary of what was discussed. Many note-taking apps also identify key points and action items based on the context of the call.
Some AI note-takers, like Fathom, Fellow, and Otter.ai, are standalone apps. These third-party solutions join your video meeting as a separate AI attendee to generate a transcript for the meeting summary. Others, like Zoom AI Companion, are a built-in feature of the meeting platform, making it easy to use and share.
Many AI note-taking apps require a full meeting recording to generate a meeting summary. If you don’t want your meeting recorded, look for a tool that doesn’t require it — for instance, Zoom AI Companion can generate a meeting summary without recording.
Taking notes during meetings and sharing notes and action items with colleagues can take up a fair amount of time at work. According to a survey conducted by Morning Consult,* nearly 75% of team leaders said they perform these tasks at least a few times a week, and 48% of leaders surveyed said they spend more time than they want taking notes.
An AI note-taker can help you save time, but there’s more to it than that. Here are a few advantages of using an AI note-taking app:
When you’re taking notes, you’re focused on the task at hand, not on what you can contribute to the discussion. Let your AI note-taker do the work, and you can be a full participant in the meeting.
Have you ever had to step away from a meeting for a second, only to miss an important detail? An AI note-taker doesn’t need to take breaks, so you can rest assured your meeting notes will be comprehensive. Plus, some tools allow you to ask your notetaking app questions about the meeting in real time, so you don’t have to say, “Can you repeat that?”
It takes time to clean up your notes and organize them after every call before you can share them with others. AI-powered meeting notes are ready to share as soon as they’re generated, so you can get those insights to your team faster. Some tools automate that process by sending the summary directly to attendees in a follow-up email or chat as soon as the meeting is over.
If you have a packed schedule and are double-booked, don’t worry. Instead of asking colleagues for an update (and relying on their notes, which might be incomplete), an AI-generated meeting summary can help you catch up on what you missed.
Attending meetings and taking notes can add up to hours of lost productivity per week. An AI note-taker could help you save time, freeing up your schedule to concentrate on more important tasks with higher impact. An ROI calculator can help you quantify the potential cost savings of implementing an AI note-taking app based on the number of employees and hours saved in a week.
The best AI notetakers enable you to be more productive with your time by offloading some of the tasks in your workday. In addition to note-taking and meeting summaries, they might also help you find the information you need by responding to questions about the meeting, capturing next steps so you can send follow-up emails more quickly, and formatting your notes in helpful project templates.
Not all AI note-taking apps have these capabilities. When evaluating solutions, here are some of the key features to look out for.
This is the cornerstone of any AI meeting note-taker: the ability to accurately transcribe a conversation and generate a summary from the text. Some note-taking tools even allow you to ask questions like, “Was my name mentioned?” or “Can you tell me what happened so far?” and get a response based on the real-time transcription. When evaluating AI meeting summary providers, read reports and reviews that speak to the accuracy and reliability of the transcript and summary.
Testing from TestDevLab showed that AI Companion had fewer errors in meeting transcripts and a higher score for meeting summaries than tested competitors.
Whether you use Zoom Meetings, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams, your AI note-taking app should be able to seamlessly join the meeting and access the transcript. Using the video conferencing platform’s built-in AI meeting summary is a great option because you don’t need to allow a third-party application to access your meeting data.
Sometimes during a meeting, sensitive information might come up that you didn’t anticipate. Having the ability to turn off your AI note-taker gives you control over what information gets included or excluded from the meeting summary. Look for a tool that has an easy off switch you can access quickly if needed. Along with that, AI tools should offer transparency, with a clear “on” status and notification so attendees know when they’re being used in a meeting.
An AI note-taker should go beyond summarizing the meeting conversation — look for one that identifies next steps and assigns action items to team members based on the discussion.
Consider whether your AI note-taker has different meeting templates depending on the type of meeting. For example, you might want to format your meeting summary as a project update doc with an emphasis on progress and next steps, a brainstorming doc categorized by topic, or a team updates doc broken down by team member.
You should be able to edit and customize your meeting notes to fix inconsistencies or errors, like a misspelled name, or add more detail to your action items.
Look for a tool that allows you to automatically share AI summaries via email or chat for easy follow-ups. You should also be able to choose who receives the summary automatically. Some solutions, like Zoom AI Companion, make it easy to create a document and automatically populate it with the meeting summary, so you can get started on your action items right away.
If you have a global team and customer base, different languages might be spoken in meetings throughout the day. Find a solution that can support multiple languages — it’s especially helpful if it can recognize the language being spoken and provide the AI summary in that language.
Many platforms, such as Microsoft 365 Copilot, offer AI capabilities as an added cost per user. Some standalone apps, such as Fathom, operate on a freemium model to provide basic meeting summaries for free and advanced features like next steps at a premium. Zoom AI Companion capabilities, including meeting summaries, next steps, and real-time meeting queries, are included at no additional cost with eligible paid Zoom plans.**
The good news is that you may already have the AI-powered note-taking capabilities you need to get automatic notes delivered to your inbox after every Zoom meeting. If you have an eligible paid Zoom plan, you already have access to AI Companion (If you don’t have an eligible plan, upgrade today).
AI Companion uses a meeting transcript to generate a detailed summary of your meeting, so you don’t need to record the meeting if you don’t want to. It organizes your meeting summary by topic so you can read about what was discussed and who said what. Crucially, it also identifies any next steps or action items based on the content of the meeting. And if you just want a short paragraph on what the meeting was about, check out the quick recap at the top for an abridged version.
Ready to get AI-powered note-taking assistance in your meetings — plus other productivity tools to help you throughout your workday?
Check out our getting started guide for everything you need to know about making the most of AI Companion, and visit our support page to learn how to enable meeting summaries.
Zoom AI Companion is available at no additional cost with eligible paid plans.** Upgrade today to get access to meeting summaries and other AI features.
Editor’s note: This blog was originally published in November 2023 and was updated in March 2025 to include the latest product information.
*Based on an online survey of 11,023 full-time knowledge workers in the U.S., U.K., Ireland, Germany, France, Japan, Singapore, and Australia. Conducted by Morning Consult on behalf of Zoom Video Communications, Inc., between August 10–25, 2023.
**Zoom AI Companion features may not be available for all regions or industry verticals. Included at no additional cost with the paid services in your Zoom user account.
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