Top 6 AI tools for accurate meeting notes

In the 15th century, Johannes Gutenberg's printing press democratized the written word, making books and information accessible to a wider audience and catalyzing the Renaissance. 

Fast forward to the 21st century, and we’re on the brink of another great leap forward. Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping how we work and share knowledge. It’s a revolution to rival the invention of the printing press. 

Even though you’re not transcribing Dante's Inferno for a printing press, AI can speed up tedious note-taking during meetings and keep your team aligned. That's why leaders of highly collaborative teams need to know the best AI meeting note tools to use, so they can get everyone focused on the meeting rather than taking notes. 

In this post, you'll discover six of the best AI tools for meeting notes and what to look for when choosing. You'll also learn how Switchboard makes meetings more efficient by keeping everything–and everyone–you need for your projects in one place. 

Keep teams aligned—effortlessly. 
Switchboard unites all your people, meeting notes, files, and tools in one place, so you’re always working in context. 
Sign up free.

Features to consider when choosing an AI tool for meeting notes

An AI meeting note tool is an application or platform that uses AI to assist in the process of creating, organizing, and managing meeting notes.

According to Axios HQ, leaders spend as much as three to ten hours every week preparing essential communications for employees. AI note-taking tools can save time on this by eliminating manual note-taking. They can also help improve engagement during meetings. 

Below, we dive into the functionality you should look for when choosing your AI note-taking tool. 

Transcribes in real time

Ideally, the tool should transcribe your meetings in real time, allowing participants to review and correct notes during the meeting itself. This helps you follow virtual meeting best practices like getting everyone involved and contributing. 

Real-time transcription can also add a layer of inclusivity to your meetings because people with hearing impairments, language barriers, or other accessibility needs, can read along. 

Moreover, the tool should be able to distinguish between different speakers, attributing each statement to the right person. 

Integrates with your video conferencing tool 

Your tool should integrate with a variety of popular video conferencing tools so you don't have to use separate tools or manually transfer information between platforms. This also makes it easier to centralize and organize information from various meetings, so you can build institutional memory and share insights across your organization.

Organizes and summarizes your notes 

Your AI meeting notes tool should extract key insights, summarize discussions, and categorize information, making your notes more valuable and allowing you to search notes and transcripts for keywords. On top of this, it should offer features for organizing and structuring notes, such as headers, bullet points, and numbered lists, as well as AI-powered note summarization.

The tool should be capable of recognizing action items and creating a list of tasks, assigning them to specific participants, and providing due dates. Integration with task management tools is a plus to streamline your workflows and use AI to improve productivity. 

Allows cross-functional and async collaboration

To get the most out of your AI-generated notes, you need a way to share them, quickly. Assess whether the tool allows you to share and collaborate on notes with your team members or clients. This could include features for commenting, editing, or exporting.  

It's important to make sure the tool is accessible on various platforms and devices, including web browsers, mobile apps, and desktop applications. It should also allow users to export meeting notes in various formats (i.e. PDF, Word, or directly to collaboration tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams). This makes them accessible to everyone and easier to share. 

Adapts and improves over time 

It’s not called machine learning for nothing, so the more you use the tool, the more it should adapt to your needs—and the greater the value you get out of it. For example, many AI note-taking tools allow for customization, letting you train the AI to recognize specialized terminology and acronyms used within your organization. This personalization can result in more precise and context-aware transcriptions.

As well as using AI for note taking, check out this post for some different ways to use AI. For now, let’s take a look at the six of the best tools for meeting notes. 

6 best AI tools for taking meeting notes

Now that you know what features to look for, let’s dive into the top tools you can use to retain more information and save time before, during, and after meetings.  

1. Otter.ai

‍Otter.ai has robust speech-to-text capabilities and real-time transcription features, making it a great AI-powered note-taking tool for meetings, interviews, and webinars. Since it transcribes in real time, you can access notes as the conversation unfolds. This means teams can review, edit, and comment on shared notes, improving communication and decision making during meetings. 

The tool can also identify and assign speech to specific participants, improving note organization and context. With advanced search and highlighting capabilities, you can search for specific keywords or phrases within your notes later, making it easy to locate important information in real time or async after the fact. 

Key features: 

• Playback control
• Import pre-recorded audio/video files
• Live captions for Zoom and Google Meet
• Advanced search functionality
• Sync from Zoom and Dropbox
• Speaker identification
• Edit text, speakers, and time codes
• Highlighting functionality
• Export audio, text, and captions 

Pricing:

• Free version with limited transcription credits
• Pro: $10/year per user
• Business: $20/year per user
• Enterprise: custom priced 

Best for: 

• Otter AI helps businesses of all sizes capture and manage key information exchanged during meetings. 

2. Fireflies

Fireflies.ai automatically records and transcribes meetings run on a range of online meeting platforms using a video conferencing bot. You can also upload audio files and use Fireflies to search, summarize, and analyze voice conversations, and generate actionable insights. For example, by automatically gathering action items from meeting agendas and gauging user sentiment, you get added context to your meetings and can make better decisions. 

With soundbites and the ability to react to specific parts of a conversation with comments or pins, it's also easier to keep your team in the loop. This saves time by focusing their attention directly where it's needed, whether you're working at the same time or catching up on the meeting async. 

Key features: 

• Conversation intelligence to track patterns in conversations and data
• Speech-to-text dictation
• Voice command for task creation
• Text editing 
• AI-powered search 
• Comment, pin, and react to specific parts of conversations
• Soundbites
• Track speaker talk time, sentiment, monologues
• Integrations with collaboration tools like Slack, Notion, Asana, and meeting platforms

Pricing: 

• Free version with limited transcription credits
• Pro: $10/month per user (billed annually) 
• Business: $19/month per user (billed annually) 
• Enterprise: custom priced

Best for: 

• Real-time transcriptions make it easy for sales reps and business development teams to learn from previous calls and get instant feedback. Fireflies also logs call notes, transcripts, and meetings directly in your CRM, making it especially useful for salespeople. 

3. Fathom

Fathom.video is an AI meeting assistant that records, transcribes, highlights, and summarizes video meetings. Using Zoom, Microsoft Teams, or Google Meet, you can click to highlight a portion of your video call and transcribe it without switching screens. When the call ends, you get instant access to the fully transcribed call recording, along with all your highlighted sections. 

Your call is also automatically summarized, so you never have to worry about information slipping through the cracks. You can also share meeting highlights in the form of video clips directly in Slack, so it's easier to take in information and stay on the same page.

Key features: 

• Real-time transcription 
• Instant access to meeting notes, highlights, and transcriptions
• AI summary and analysis
• Integrates with task management tools like Hubspot, Google Docs, Gmail, Asana, and Notion
• Automatic CRM sync

Pricing: 

• Free version with no usage limitations
• Fathom Team Edition Standard: $24/month per user 
• Fathom Team Edition Pro: $29/month per user

Best for: 

• Fathom.video lets user experience and product teams take information sharing to the next level with video clips of user quotes and testimonials to back up every product decision.
  

4. Superpowered

Superpowered.me is an AI note-taker that doesn't use bots or recordings. Instead, audio is transcribed live and the audio recording is deleted immediately. This means it will never run out of storage, but you can’t revisit video or audio clips like you can with tools like Fathom. It also only stores transcripts for seven days, but you can export AI-generated notes from your transcripts. The tool supports every meeting platform, which makes it accessible to most teams.

Key features: 

• AI templates for meeting notes
• AI note-taker to transcribe meetings, generate notes, and propose action items

Pricing: 

• Free version with limited transcription credits
• Basic: $30/month
• Pro: $90/month

Best for: 

• Superpowered gives small teams and individuals all the features they need to transcribe meetings, without all the extra bells and whistles that other tools offer.  

5. Happy Scribe

Made for transcribers and subtitlers, Happy Scribe creates instant AI-generated transcriptions including speakers and timestamps. Or, if you're looking for 99% accuracy, you can send the recording out for someone to transcribe within 24 hours. Then, you can share transcripts with key stakeholders in edit or view-only mode to bring visibility to your collaborative process. You can also export your file into any format, making it easy to integrate insights into your existing documentation.  

Key features: 

• No limits on audio uploads
• Workspaces for collaboration
• Transcription editor
• Machine translation
• AI transcription and subtitles
• APIs and integrations with popular tools like Zapier and Youtube

Pricing:

• Free version with limited transcription credits
• Basic: $10/month (billed annually) 
• Pro: $17/month (billed annually) 
• Business: $29/month (billed annually) 

Best for: 

• This tool is particularly useful for journalists, educators, and people in media production and distribution. It also offers discounts to businesses seeking to transcribe or subtitle large amounts of audio. For example, educational institutions or students.

6. Mem

Mem is an AI-powered note-taking app that brings all your notes, links, and even Tweets, together. Simply pull up the AI chat feature during meetings to help you summarize meeting notes and key takeaways. You can also access ideas from previous meetings, search content, and generate action plans from saved insights and knowledge. 

Key features:

• Quick capture to save any file
• AI-powered smart search and chat functionality 
• Knowledge creation capabilities
• Context-aware AI assistance during meetings
• Integrations with popular tools

Pricing: 

• Free version
• Mem X: $8/month (billed annually)
• Mem X Teams: $15/month per user (billed annually)
• Mem X Enterprise: custom priced

Best for: 

• Mem is a great option for tech-savvy teams looking to create your own personal search engine that unifies all your ideas, notes, and brainstorms. 

Now you know the best AI meeting notes tools to use, let’s take a look at how Switchboard helps you run better meetings. 

How Switchboard makes meetings more efficient

Switchboard is a visual collaboration platform whose AI feature automatically produces short, actionable summaries of any web pages, transcripts, or documents. Just add these to your dedicated project room and let it get to work. With a single layer of AI across multiple tools, you can have all your favorite tools talk to each other, and process all the information from meetings or project work sessions.  

Switchboard AI not only lets you summarize meeting content but also ask questions, including comparing apps to each other. This means you can have your meeting notes in the room as well as your project tracker, and ask Switchboard AI questions like: "Did we talk about all the overdue tasks in our meeting yesterday?" This way, nothing slips through the cracks and it's easier to keep meetings focused.

All browser-based apps work in Switchboard with no integrations. That means you can use tools like Otter.ai in the meeting room to create real time meeting transcripts. Or you can upload notes and transcripts from these tools to your persistent Switchboard project room so anyone can get up to speed after the meeting. This makes Switchboard a source of truth that helps boost productivity through teamwork. Team members can access materials during real-time work sessions or on their own schedule.  

The best AI meeting notes tools + Switchboard = more productive meetings 

With the invention of the printing press, people started building vast libraries to hold all their new books, manuscripts, and pamphlets. Today, we’ve got vast folders of digital files and meeting notes, not all of which are as well organized as a library. 

To keep your teams aligned, you need to choose the right meeting notes tool and find a way to share those notes with your team. In this post, we reviewed six of the best AI meeting notes tools, including Otter.ai, Fathom, Fireflies, Superpowered, Happy Scribe, and Mem.  

Once you’ve chosen the best AI meeting note tool for your team, you can use it inside your persistent Switchboard room and store transcripts and notes there. This reduces context switching between tools and keeps all your meeting notes, meeting recordings, files, and people organized in one place.

You can also use Switchboard’s own AI technology to summarize room activity and sticky notes and ask questions, including comparing apps to each other. This way, everyone can get up to speed quickly—whether they were in the meeting or not.   

Keep teams aligned—effortlessly. 
Switchboard unites all your people, meeting notes, files, and tools in one place, so you’re always working in context. 
Sign up free.