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 calls, transcribe in real time, and generate action-item summaries with no manual effort. For teams already in Microsoft 365, Copilot for Microsoft Teams does the same job natively inside the apps you're already using.
AI meeting summary tools work by joining your video call as a bot participant (or via a desktop audio capture), transcribing everything said, and then running that transcript through a large language model to extract key decisions, action items, and discussion highlights. The output usually arrives in your inbox or a shared workspace within minutes of the call ending. Otter.ai is the most accessible entry point for small businesses — it has a generous free tier, works with Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams, and lets you search across all your past transcripts by keyword. Its AI summary identifies speakers, timestamps key moments, and pulls out to-dos automatically. The paid plans add CRM integrations and longer recording limits. Fireflies.ai skews slightly more toward sales and ops teams. Its standout feature is the ability to create "soundbites" — shareable clips of specific moments in a meeting — and it integrates directly with tools like Salesforce, HubSpot, Notion, and Slack. If your workflow involves logging call notes into a CRM, Fireflies saves significant manual entry time. If your team is on Microsoft 365, Copilot for Teams is worth evaluating before signing up for a third-party tool. It summarizes meetings, answers questions about what was discussed, and drafts follow-up emails — all without leaving the Microsoft environment. The tradeoff is cost: it requires a Copilot for Microsoft 365 license on top of your existing subscription.