How do I use AI to summarize meeting notes
Paste your raw notes or transcript into an AI assistant like ChatGPT or Claude and ask for a summary with decisions and action items broken out separately. For recurring meetings, use a dedicated notetaker like Otter.ai or Fathom that joins the call, transcribes it live, and emails the summary automatically. Setup takes about five minutes and saves 15-30 minutes per meeting.
The fastest path is the manual one. Record or type your notes, then paste them into ChatGPT or Claude with a prompt like: "Summarize these meeting notes in three sections — key decisions, action items with owners, and open questions." Naming the sections you want is the whole trick. A vague "summarize this" gets you a paragraph nobody reads. A structured request gets you something you can paste straight into Slack. If you're doing this more than twice a week, automate it. Otter.ai, Fathom, and Fireflies.ai all connect to Zoom, Google Meet, and Teams, join meetings as a participant, and send a summary within minutes of the call ending. Fathom has a genuinely usable free tier for unlimited recordings. Otter's free plan caps you at 300 transcription minutes a month, which covers roughly one meeting a day. Watch out for two things. Speaker labels get muddled on calls with more than five people, so verify who owns which action item before you send the summary out. And AI notetakers will confidently transcribe a mumbled "let's not do that" as "let's do that" — always skim the decisions section against your own memory. One more habit worth building: keep a running doc of summaries per project rather than per meeting. Feed the whole doc back to the AI monthly and ask what commitments never got closed. That's where the real value shows up — not in the individual summary, but in catching the action items that quietly died.