What is the best AI tool for summarizing meeting notes
Otter.ai and Fireflies.ai are the strongest options for most small businesses — both record, transcribe, and auto-summarize meetings with action items pulled out automatically. If you're already in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, Copilot in Teams does this natively without a separate subscription.
For small business owners who spend hours after every call cleaning up notes, AI meeting summarizers are one of the fastest ROI tools available. Otter.ai joins your Zoom, Google Meet, or Teams call as a bot, transcribes in real time, and delivers a summary with highlighted action items within minutes of the call ending. The free tier covers 300 minutes per month, which is plenty for light users. Fireflies.ai takes a similar approach but adds a searchable meeting database and CRM integrations (HubSpot, Salesforce) that make it more useful if you're tracking client conversations over time. It also supports 60+ languages, which matters if you work across time zones. If your team is on Microsoft 365 Business, Copilot for Microsoft 365 is worth evaluating first — it summarizes Teams meetings, drafts follow-up emails, and pulls action items directly into To Do or Planner without any third-party tool. The catch is the $30/user/month add-on cost, which makes it overkill for solo operators. For one-off needs or lighter use, uploading a transcript to ChatGPT or Claude with a prompt like "summarize this and list action items" works surprisingly well — no subscription required beyond what you may already have.