What is the best AI note taker?

What is the best AI note taker?

Kathlyn Jacobson
By Kathlyn Jacobson
Technology
10 Min Read

What Your AI Note Taker Gets Wrong, And 5 That Don’t

After weeks of running the same meetings through every major AI note taker, one thing stood out: most of them stop at the transcript. The hour after the call, the action items, the follow-ups, the CRM updates, is where the real work happens, and where most tools quit.

What Most AI Note Takers Get Wrong

Follow-up is usually where things go sideways. They record, transcribe, maybe summarize, then leave the rest to you. The hour after a call is where work disappears: action items go unassigned, emails sit unsent, whole decisions quietly vanish before anyone writes them down.

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Meeting overhead is already out of hand. A joint Deloitte and Zoom report found that teams spend 25 hours a week on meeting-related work, and 63% of that is preparation and follow-up, not the call itself. That’s the gap these tools should be closing, and it’s exactly what we were looking for when testing them.

Of everything we put through its paces, Lindy came closest to solving it.

What We Looked For

We ran each tool through team syncs, client calls, and async review sessions. We looked at four things:

  • Follow-up execution: Does it help with what happens after, or does it stop at the summary?
  • Capture quality: How accurate are the notes, and how much cleanup do they need?
  • Integration depth: Can it push information into the apps your team already uses?
  • Time to value: How fast can someone get something useful out of it?

Not every tool passed. The five below stood out, each for different reasons.

The 5 Best AI Note Takers in 2026

Every tool here was built with a different team in mind. What follows is what each one is good at, and where it runs out of road.

1. Lindy: Best for Turning Meeting Notes Into Action

Lindy’s an AI assistant you text to capture meeting notes, pull out decisions, and handle the post-call work that usually gets buried. A lot of tools call it done at the summary. Lindy keeps going.

After a call, you tell Lindy what you need in normal language. Send action items to participants, schedule a follow-up, and update your CRM. It connects to hundreds of integrations, so it can pull information across your apps and act on it.

If live captions during the call are your priority, you’ll want something else. But if the meeting is where your work starts, Lindy is the pick.

Starting price: 7-day free trial, then Plus from $49.99/month (billed monthly).

2. Otter: Best for Live Meeting Transcription

Otter is built around real-time capture. OtterPilot, its meeting bot, transcribes as the call happens, labels speakers automatically, and gives everyone on the team a shared place to follow along.

It works best when you need to track exact wording, on sales calls, recruiting interviews, and fast-moving team meetings where you can’t afford to miss something. Summaries often need cleanup, though, especially when multiple people talk over each other.

Otter AI Chat is there if you need it, but transcription is clearly where the product lives. For teams that want a live transcript and nothing more, Otter is solid.

Starting price: Free plan with 300 minutes/month; Pro from $16.99/user/month (billed monthly)

3. Jamie: Best for Bot-Free Notes Across Any Platform

Jamie doesn’t join your calls. It runs as a desktop app on Mac or Windows, captures audio directly from your device, and generates notes after the meeting ends without anyone seeing a bot on the call.

It works across Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, and in-person conversations. Summaries come through quickly after the call, with action items and speaker identification included. CRM integrations with Salesforce, HubSpot, and Notion are available on paid plans.

For client calls or interviews where a visible bot creates friction, Jamie is the cleanest option in this list.

Starting price: Free (10 meetings/month); paid plans from €25/month (billed monthly)

4. Fireflies.ai: Best for Searchable Meeting History

Fireflies sends its bot, Fred, to join your calls and transcribe them. What makes it worth considering is the archive. Every meeting gets stored and searchable down to the specific sentence and timestamp, so you can pull up what a client said months ago without replaying the recording.

AskFred lets you query that history in plain language. The free plan covers unlimited transcripts, but AI summaries and action items require paid credits, so the free tier works better as a search archive than a full note-taking solution.

For teams that revisit past conversations often, Fireflies is hard to beat.

Starting price: Free plan available; Pro from $18/seat/month (billed monthly)

5. Notion AI: Best for Teams Already Working in Notion

Notion AI works as an extension of a workspace your team probably already uses. Teams already documenting decisions and projects in Notion can keep meeting notes there too, without switching tools.

It transcribes live with AI Meeting Notes and summarizes after, pulling out action items and linking them back to the transcript. One thing worth knowing is that speaker labeling works reliably in one-on-one virtual calls but gets inconsistent in larger group meetings, according to Notion’s own documentation.

If you’re planning to roll it out across a full team, that’s worth testing first.

Starting price: Free, with AI Meeting Notes available on Business at $24/member/month (billed monthly)

Which One Is Right for You

Capture is the easier part. All five do a decent job of that. The harder question is what happens to those notes once the meeting is over.

AI adoption is everywhere now, but running a tool and weaving it into actual workflows are different problems. Gallup’s Q4 2025 workplace survey found that 49% of U.S. workers say they never use AI in their role. The tools that get used are the ones that fit into an existing workflow, not the ones with the longest feature list.

If you mostly need a record of what was said, Otter or Fireflies will do the job. If bot-free capture matters for your meetings, Jamie is the cleaner option. If you’re trying to close the gap between the meeting and the work that follows, look at Lindy. Notion AI works if your team already lives there.

The right fit depends on what breaks down after your meetings, not on how many features get listed.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an AI Note Taker?

An AI note taker joins your calls, writes up what happened, and flags what needs follow-up. Most also surface action items and decisions, so you can review what came out of a meeting without replaying the whole thing.

What Is the Best AI Note Taker for Following Up After Meetings?

Lindy. Most note takers give you a transcript and a summary, then leave the rest to you. The platform goes further. After the call, you tell it what you need in plain language, and it handles the follow-through. It can assign action items, push follow-ups onto calendars, and sync the outcome to whatever apps you use.

If closing the gap between the meeting and the work that follows is the problem, Lindy is the closest thing to a solution in this list.

Do AI Note Takers Work for In-Person Meetings?

Most are built for virtual calls like Zoom, Google Meet, and Teams. In-person setups are harder. If that’s your main use case, look at device-based recording tools before committing to a bot-based solution.

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