When you’re in a meeting, you’re splitting yourself in two: the active listener who’s paying attention to the speaker, and the thorough note-taker who’s saving every insight for later. But doing two jobs at once is always tricky. You’ll either miss the opportunity to ask a great question or fail to take a critical note that you’ll need in the future.
AI meeting assistants are here to help. They’ll record your calls, transcribe the audio, and store it all for later use. You can then use a range of AI features to extract information, doing things like summarizing the transcript, listing key insights, and generating action items.
I spent time doing in-depth research and testing on all the AI meeting assistants available, and based on my experiences, these are the best.
The best AI meeting assistants
- Fireflies for collaboration and topic tracking
- Avoma for conversation analytics
- tl;dv for AI-powered meeting search
- Equal Time for inclusive meetings
- Rewatch for creating a video wiki
- Otter for asking questions about your meetings
- Nyota for AI feature variety
- Fellow for native integrations
- Fathom for a free option
What makes the best AI note taker for meetings?
How we evaluate and test apps
Our best apps roundups are written by humans who’ve spent much of their careers using, testing, and writing about software. Unless explicitly stated, we spend dozens of hours researching and testing apps, using each app as it’s intended to be used and evaluating it against the criteria we set for the category. We’re never paid for placement in our articles from any app or for links to any site—we value the trust readers put in us to offer authentic evaluations of the categories and apps we review. For more details on our process, read the full rundown of how we select apps to feature on the Zapier blog.
There’s one important distinction here: AI meeting assistants aren’t out to replace your current video conferencing platform. Quite the opposite: they’ll empower Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams (and other platforms) with a range of new features that’ll help you keep track of your meetings. You can use them to refresh your memory, accurately quote people, or propagate important information to all members of your team.
There’s one common thread among the apps you’re about to discover: all of them transcribe your meetings’ audio into text, making it easy to search through everything that was said. From that point on, each app has its unique spin on how to best assist you: it can help you summarize the entire conversation, extract key insights, or provide analytics to help you improve productivity.
Here’s what I looked for as I was testing the AI meeting assistants:
- Easy implementation: These apps are simple to connect to your calendar and video conferencing software, and work with—at minimum—Zoom and Google Meet.
- Quality AI features: I looked at transcription quality and the value of any other AI features the platform offers, including summarization, extracting insights, and sentiment analysis.
- Automation and other productivity features: I prioritized apps that offer time-saving features, such as automatically joining meetings for you or helping you deliver meeting agendas before the event.
- Organization and collaboration features: Once the meeting is over, you need to keep things organized, so it’s easier to search for information later. Sharing should also be simple, so you can keep your entire team in the loop.
- Integrations: The more the merrier, especially if you can send lead data to a CRM, action items to a task management app, or a summary of a meeting to a dedicated Slack channel.
I tested these apps over the course of two weeks, as I held meetings either with myself or with my clients. Once these meetings were over, I went to the dashboard to judge the quality of the transcript and see what features were available to extract more value from it. I checked out how easy it was to share it with others, and I tried a few integrations to see how seamless the data transmission was.
One note: I didn’t include video conferencing apps, no matter how good their meeting assistant features were. When you’re looking for a meeting assistant, you’re not looking to completely migrate to an entirely new platform, just add an extra layer of productivity features on top of what you already have. (But if you do want to move to a greener video conferencing pasture, check out Zapier’s list of the best video conferencing apps). I also didn’t include any pure revenue intelligence apps—while some of these apps have revenue intelligence features, I wanted apps that could be used for any sort of meeting.
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