What is the best AI tool to automatically summarize meeting notes
Otter.ai and Fireflies.ai are the top choices for automatically summarizing meeting notes — both join your Zoom, Teams, or Google Meet calls, transcribe the conversation in real time, and generate a structured summary with action items when the call ends. For most small business owners, Otter.ai's free tier is enough to get started without committing to a paid plan.
Both Otter.ai and Fireflies.ai work as AI meeting bots that join your scheduled calls automatically. After the meeting, they produce a full transcript plus a condensed summary that highlights key decisions and assigns action items to specific speakers. The summaries are searchable, shareable by link, and can be exported to tools like Notion, Slack, or HubSpot. The main difference between the two comes down to integrations and depth. Fireflies leans heavier into CRM sync and has stronger pipeline coverage for sales teams, while Otter.ai has a cleaner interface and a more generous free plan (300 minutes per month). If your team lives in Google Workspace, Otter's native Google Calendar and Google Meet integration is particularly frictionless. For meetings that can't have a bot present — like in-person client visits or phone calls — Otter.ai also has a mobile app that records audio directly and transcribes locally. You can upload an existing recording too. This makes it useful well beyond scheduled video calls. One practical tip: train your team to say action item owners out loud during the call (e.g., "Sarah will send the proposal by Friday"). AI summarizers catch explicit assignments far more reliably than implied ones, so a small habit change dramatically improves the quality of the output you get.