Best AI meeting note-takers 2026

The best AI meeting note-takers in 2026 are Granola, Fathom, Otter.ai, Fireflies.ai, Marloo, Microsoft Copilot, and Contented. Each suits a different team, budget, and workflow. Here's how they compare.

Why buyers compare AI note-taking tools.

AI note-taking has moved from novelty to necessity. According to a 2026 EDUCAUSE survey of 1960 higher-education professionals, 61% had used AI to summarise long documents or meetings in the previous six months. A 2025 Pew Research Center survey found that 40% of US workers who had used AI chatbots at work had used them to summarise information from documents or meetings. Most teams now expect a transcript and a summary after every call.

Picking the right tool can be tough, because accuracy, pricing, and how well each product fits your existing workflow vary a lot between options.

This page compares the six most common AI meeting note-takers we hear about, plus our own product, Contented. We'll be direct about where each tool wins and where it falls short.

Product comparison at a glance.

AI note-taking: what each tool does.

Every tool on this list captures audio and produces a transcript. The difference is what happens next.

Granola

Granola is designed as an AI-powered notepad for individuals who are in back-to-back meetings all day. You jot notes during the meeting, and Granola enhances them with key themes and structure afterwards. It integrates with your calendar so notes are linked to events automatically.

It captures computer audio locally, without a bot joining your call, and listens to what's playing through your computer rather than connecting to Zoom or Teams directly. Granola also supports in-person and phone meetings.via app. Getting the most from Granola means understanding prompts and LLM (large language model) choices, so it suits technically confident users because the quality of the output depends on the quality of what you input and choose. It doesn't produce formal, structured documents at scale.

Granola is built in the UK. Its Business plan adds integrations with Attio, Notion, Slack, HubSpot, Affinity, and Zapier. It's trusted by teams at companies like Vercel, Brex, Intercom, and Cursor.

Fathom

Fathom transcribes your call in real time and then produces summaries, highlights, and CRM-ready notes automatically once the meeting ends. It records video calls by joining as a bot participant on Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams, and is designed for video calls only. It does not support in-person meeting recording. It offers more than 15 advanced summary templates including BANT, SPICED, MEDDPICC, and customer success formats. Its CRM integrations push summaries directly into HubSpot, Salesforce, and Close records. The Deal View feature on the Business plan gives sales teams AI-generated deal summaries, buying roles, pain points, and next steps. Fathom reports, based on its own Q4 2025 user survey, an average of 38 minutes per meeting, and it's been named to G2's 2026 Best Software Awards Top 100. It's a strong pick for sales and customer success teams. For teams outside those functions, or teams that need documents beyond meeting summaries, other tools on this list may be a better fit.

Fathom stores data in the United States.

Contented

Contented is built for teams who need more than a summary at the end of a meeting. The workflow is straightforward: record on your phone or computer, and the conversation syncs to your workspace automatically. No bot joins your call. From there, you apply one of 50+ expert templates to turn the recording into a polished document - formal minutes, a client profile, a SWOT, a decision log - whatever your team needs to file, follow up on, or share. Custom templates mean Contented outputs can be in your company's specific voice and formats.

Because you record through the app on your phone (iOS or Android) or desktop (Windows), Contented works for in-person and on-the-go meetings, not just video calls. Take your phone into a boardroom, a client meeting, or a site visit, and the recording captures it all. That's a big difference for teams whose most important conversations don't happen on Zoom.

Contented's transcription is excellent. It is designed for diverse accents, noisy spaces, and lots of cross-talk.

Contented offers a free seven-day trial, and pricing is based per-usage - that means everyone in the organisation gets to use it and share, rather than choosing one or two.

If your priority is pushing summaries directly into a CRM or project management tool, Fathom or Fireflies.ai currently have more integrations built in. Contented's focus is on the quality and structure of the document output, not the volume of app connections.

Contented is founded and headquartered in Christchurch, New Zealand, and supports more than 500 companies. Its co-founders Lucy Pink and Hannah Hardy-Jones started the company based on their belief that human conversations are the most underutilised resource in the world.

Contented works for any kind of business or industry - it's not specific to finance or product or sales.

Otter.ai

Otter.ai is one of the most established names in AI note-taking. It's a Mountain View, California-based company that serves millions of users.

Otter records in two main ways. Its bot joins video calls on Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams automatically. Its desktop app can also capture audio directly from your computer, which means it works for in-person meetings and phone calls, not just video calls. On mobile, you can record in-person conversations through the Otter app.

Transcription accuracy is generally strong for clear audio with distinct speakers, but it can struggle with heavy accents, crosstalk, and technical jargon. Speaker identification works well when speakers are separated clearly, but in fast-moving conversations with multiple people talking over each other, the transcript can require manual cleanup to assign dialogue correctly.

From the transcript, Otter automatically produces a summary, action items, and a searchable record of the meeting. Action items are pulled out automatically too, though you may want to review them because Otter sometimes picks up discussion points as actions. The transcript itself is editable, and you can highlight sections, add comments, and share specific clips with teammates.

Otter's AI Chat searches across meetings and connected apps to answer questions and draft follow-ups. Paid plans start at $8.33 per user per month, billed annually, which makes it one of the more affordable options on this list. If your team is large, meeting volume is high, and budget is a primary concern, Otter is worth a look, although having to pay per seat often means a number of team members miss out.

Fireflies.ai

Fireflies.ai positions itself as an AI assistant for meetings that transcribes, summarises, searches, and analyses conversations. It supports transcription in more than 100 languages, provides speaker labels, and offers analytics on talk time, sentiment, and topics. Its integration catalogue covers more than 100 apps, including Salesforce, HubSpot, Slack, Jira, Asana, and Greenhouse.

Fireflies.ai sends a bot to join video calls on Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and other platforms. It can also transcribe audio files you upload manually. In-person recording is via its mobile app. Fireflies also offers Voice Agents that can qualify leads and capture BANT information, and its AskFred feature lets you search across your entire meeting library. The Pro plan starts at $10 per user per month billed annually. Fireflies.ai is built in the United States. If breadth of integration is your top priority, Fireflies is a serious contender.

Marloo

Marloo is built specifically for financial advisers. It handles administrative work from the first client meeting through to the final advice document - generating transcripts, structured summaries, financial plans, investment proposals, and review letters using client context and customisable Word templates. Its Client View combines meetings, files, emails, notes, tasks, documents, and forms in a single client record. Marloo supports Teams calls, client documents, phone conversations, and voice notes.

Marloo is SOC 2 Type II and GDPR compliant, does not sell client data, and does not use client data to train AI models. Marloo has offices in New York, London, and Sydney. If you're a financial adviser, Marloo is the most purpose-built option on this list. For non-finance teams, it's not a simple fit.

Microsoft Copilot

Microsoft Copilot is the natural choice if your organisation is already deep in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. It integrates across Teams, Outlook, Word, and the rest of the suite, which reduces friction for teams that live in those tools. It does not support in-person meeting recording outside of Teams. Copilot works within Microsoft Teams meetings. When a Teams meeting ends, Copilot can generate a summary of what was discussed, pull out action items and who owns them, and produce a full transcript you can search and review. During a live meeting, you can ask Copilot questions in the chat - things like "what have we agreed so far?" or "catch me up" if you join late. After the meeting, you can use Copilot in Teams to ask follow-up questions against the transcript, draft a follow-up email in Outlook based on the meeting content, or pull the key points into a Word document.

Copilot summaries can feel flat, and miss the relative weight given to different topics during the conversation. Its transcription accuracy is affected by non-US accents, due to the system's optimisation for mostly American accents. Background noise and overlapping speech can further reduce accuracy. When you're producing compliance records or client-facing documents, those issues can mean a lot of clean up post-meeting.

Microsoft is headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA.

How to pick the right tool.

Does your most important conversation happen on a video call? If yes, any tool here works. If your critical conversations are in-person site visits, meeting rooms, or client kitchens, you need a tool that records through a phone. Check current mobile support before you commit, because several vendors are shipping this now.

Do you need a summary, or a formatted document? Summaries are commodity. If you then have to turn it into minutes, a client profile, or a SWOT, you're buying half a workflow.

Who's paying, and for how many people? Per-seat pricing means deciding who gets left out. Usage-based pricing means everyone's in.

Is your workflow one regulated speciality? Vertical tools go deeper than horizontal ones. If you're a financial adviser, HR manager, a workspace with role-specific templates and workflows will beat a general one on that workflow.

The best AI meeting note-takers all capture audio and produce a transcript. What separates them is what they do with it. Pick the tool that matches what your team needs to get out of meetings in order to move work forward, not just recap what's been said.