What is the best AI tool for writing meeting summaries
Otter.ai is the most widely used AI tool for meeting summaries — it joins your Zoom, Meet, or Teams call automatically, transcribes in real time, and emails a summary with action items before you've closed your laptop. For teams already on Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, Copilot in Teams and Gemini in Meet handle the same job with no extra login required.
Meeting notes used to mean someone volunteering to type while everyone else talked, then spending another 20 minutes cleaning it up after. AI tools have turned that into a background task — the summary lands in your inbox while you're still saying goodbye on the call. Otter.ai is the most purpose-built option. Connect it to your calendar once and it joins every meeting as a silent participant, identifies who said what, and delivers a structured summary with key decisions and action items highlighted. The free tier covers 300 minutes of transcription per month, which is enough for most small teams. Paid plans add integrations with Salesforce, Slack, and Notion for teams that want summaries to flow directly into their existing workflows. If your organization already pays for Microsoft 365 Copilot, the Teams integration is the easiest path — it summarizes meetings, links notes to related emails, and can draft follow-up messages in one step. Google Workspace users get comparable functionality through Gemini in Meet, which rolled out broadly in 2024 and is included in certain Workspace tiers at no additional cost. For occasional use without a new subscription, copying a meeting transcript into ChatGPT or Claude and prompting "summarize this and pull out action items" works well. The tradeoff is that you still have to manually record and paste the transcript, which is exactly the friction that dedicated tools like Otter eliminate.