I tested 5 Best AI Note Takers in 2026 [Free & Paid]

I analysed the top 5 best AI note-takers of 2026: Jamie, Granola, Fireflies, Otter, and Fathom. I installed all their five desktop apps and tested them at the same time on their free versions, comparing live transcription, summary accuracy, and speaker identification on the same audio (a public earnings-call recording). 

For the rest, I did a full feature research and pricing review. You'll also find a side-by-side comparison table with an expandable answer in every cell; my hands-on reviews; what their own users like and dislike about each product; and the accuracy test comes with a downloadable document so you can verify every score yourself, backed by word-for-word quotes and screenshots.

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My honest top 5 AI note takers picks for 2026

After testing all 5 AI meeting note takers – Jamie, Fathom, Otter, Fireflies, and Granola – here's how I'd categorise them so you can jump straight to the one that fits how you actually work:

• Best overall: Jamie (accurate, private, bot-free, strong in almost every category)
• Best free: Fathom (unlimited recording + transcription, no time cap; Jamie, Fireflies, and Granola also have solid free tiers)
• Best for accuracy: Jamie (top of our test on transcription and who-said-what)
• Best for teams/CRM: Otter and Fireflies (structured templates, CRM sync, deep integrations), with Jamie close behind
• Best for solo/simple: Granola and Jamie (calm, minimalist, bot-free)

Here's how I tested all 5 AI note-takers and their results

I downloaded all five desktop apps onto one Mac and ran the same ~11-minute Alphabet Q1 2026 earnings call through every one at the same time, then scored each out of 100 on summary, transcription, and speaker identification, marked against what was actually said. 

To stay accurate, we checked across Alphabet's own published remarks, its SEC earnings release, and the recording itself, and treated the Motley Fool transcript only as a secondary cross-check, since it skips the intro and carries its own typos. Every score below is backed by verbatim proof you can check in our full scoring and receipts.

Overall Comparison Table on the best AI note takers

This table contains the overall comparison information of all the best 5 AI note takers; Jamie, Fathom, Granola, Otter, and Fireflies. You can also expand the cells for more information. 

What are the best AI note takers?

1. Jamie review: private, bot-free, flawless on speakers identification, best for confidential meetings

Verdict

You're going to love Jamie if you're looking for an extremely secure, privacy-focused meeting assistant that you can run on your own PC or laptop, or even your mobile device, without putting creepy bots in your meetings. 

The reliability is also incredible in terms of the accuracy of notes and identifying each speaker (and pairing those identified speakers) across multiple meetings; as such, it's ideal for professionals who require absolutely clean, confidential recordings of who said what. 

• Who is Jamie for?: Any professional requiring extremely sensitive/confidential high-stakes meetings where they will have complete confidence in knowing exactly who said what during the meeting, with a totally seamless/bot-free recording experience.
• Who should consider thinking twice about using Jamie? Anyone who wants extremely structured and visually appealing summaries/notes that are instantaneously interesting and easily readable/glanceable.
• Take away: If you require extreme levels of confidentiality and/or the ability to identify with precision who said what with one of the highest accuracy notes, then keep Jamie. But you'll likely spend some quality time reading through the summaries, and you can still cut that time by simply asking what you need to know straight from Jamie's own Ask AI. 

What is Jamie?

Jamie is a completely bot-free AI note taker that is available for Mac, Windows and iOS devices. This means that when you use Jamie to record any meeting (either online or in-person), there is never a bot joining the meeting. 

With Jamie, you can quickly turn any meeting into a set of organised meeting notes (structured notes); a full transcription of the meeting; and action items in just about 30 seconds.

Additionally, Jamie can understand and transcribe speech in 100+ languages and has speaker memory which will learn your voice(s) over time. 

Jamie is developed by a German company, is GDPR compliant, deletes all audio once your meeting notes are complete, encrypts your data on EU servers, and uses your data exclusively to provide service to you. Jamie does not use your data to develop/train their AIs.

Features I tried

Native Recorder and Live Transcript

As you can probably tell by the image below, I am currently using Jamie's bot-free recorder. Once opened, it defaults into "scratch pad" mode. 

However, if you wish to use the recorder in a "live-transcription" mode, you can simply toggle the recorder on (as shown below). 

This application will record locally via your laptop microphone; thus, it works well in conjunction with remote meetings, and/or in person meetings. I was able to successfully utilise the "live transcription" function as I was speaking. 

Tags

With this function, organising your meeting notes becomes extremely easy. You're able to create categories (Tags) for all of your recordings. 

Over the past few days, I have utilised this feature to organise my meeting notes under several folders including: tool testing, 1 on 1 feedback sessions, demo days, and blog writing. 

Tags are smart and can even auto-apply relevant Tags for your new meetings, based upon what you actually discussed within those meetings.

Ask AI and History

AI assistant is another built-in feature that functions similarly to a "smart partner" for your meetings. There are no limits or costs associated with utilising this feature; you can interact with it entirely for free.

AI assistant offers suggestions for prompts and asks questions related to your meetings immediately after opening the meeting notes. 

A particularly cool aspect of AI assistant is that its focus changes dynamically based on where you are: 

Scenario 1: If you are viewing all your files, AI assistant will search across all meetings.

Scenario 2: However, once you click into a specific file, AI assistant will dynamically shift its focus solely to that meeting. 

Additionally, if you ever require retrieving an older response, there is a "History" button that enables jumping back into prior conversations with AI assistant.

Tasks

In contrast to manually typing out what needs to be accomplished next, Tasks automatically pulls out action items from the meeting transcript, assigns those action items to the appropriate speaker(s), and keeps track of their status. 

I used Tasks to track my work on articles, and it is very gratifying to mark Tasks as completed once they are finished. You can also manually add due dates to Tasks, filter Tasks, and prioritise them (high/medium/low) through visual priority bars.

Speaker Memory

This is a huge time-saver, and you'll definitely want to leave this enabled. Jamie remembers individual voices over multiple meetings in order to match speakers correctly throughout the entire experience. Therefore, I didn't need to perform any manual voice identification, as Jamie would automatically map out the various operators and executives involved in my test run without any additional input from me.

Personalisation

When teaching Jamie about who you are, specifically about your company name, job title and what we do, it is possible to create summaries that sound like they could belong to your business. For example, when I entered this information into settings, Jamie began producing summary outputs that sounded like they belonged to my business.

Templates

Jamie offers pre-made Templates. Furthermore, you can create custom Templates using the free plan. The auto-apply toggle reads the context of the meeting and automatically formats your notes with your preferred template without manually picking it.

Consent Recording Notice

When you want to be professional and transparent about how Jamie handles privacy, the consent recording notice allows you to send an extremely polite consent notice to attendees 24 hours prior to your meeting's start time. 

This will explain exactly how Jamie handles privacy so that you don't have to waste any time explaining it yourself when the call begins. You also have the option to exclude specific email domains for internal colleagues who meet daily, so they won't receive spam from you.

Agent and Skills (Pro and Above)

You will start to use the tool for more than just simple meeting documentation and go into full workflow automation. When you connect to other external tools like Slack, Notion, GitHub or Linear, the agent can then be used to perform additional complex tasks. 

For example, the agent can create a list of all changes made to products during meetings and/or create project tickets from the meeting information. 

The agent can also run these longer jobs in the background while sending notifications to you once completed. The skill feature provides the instruction layer for this. With custom prompts, it allows you to tell the agent what to do next time you request a briefing. 

Please remember, the connector features are Pro-level features.

Sharing Integrations

Once your meeting notes have been created, you can now quickly share them with your team members by using a link, emailing them, or sharing them via a third-party application integration. On the Free version, your meeting notes can be exported to Google, Notion, and OneNote.

How much does Jamie cost?

Jamie has 5 plans. The free plan includes all core features like meeting notes, transcripts, action items, speaker identification, and 100+ language support. Paid plans add more meetings and longer recording times. Prices are monthly and shown in euros, as of July 2026.

• Free (€0/month), 10 meetings per month, 30-minute limit
• Plus (€25/month), 20 meetings per month, 2-hour limit
• Pro (€47/month), Unlimited meetings, 3-hour limit
• Team (€39/month per seat), Unlimited meetings, 3-hour limit, centralised billing
• Enterprise (Custom pricing),Custom solutions, contact for details

💜 Gentle Reminder: Pricing may change. Please double-check on Jamie's official pricing page.

Things I love

There were numerous aspects of this platform that are extremely easy and user-friendly. Therefore, I had no problem at all when having to take part in very large meetings.

An extremely easy recording experience that does not involve any unwanted bot interruptions.

• It works everywhere using your laptop's internal microphone for every meeting.
• Because of this, I could have complete confidentiality while participating in these calls without there being an unwanted bot taking place.

Flawless speaker identification that automatically identifies speakers without manually doing so.

• I did not need to move one finger in order to determine who said what in the testing.
• It automatically identifies each of the participants as well as executives involved in the meeting, and remembers them for future meetings, therefore eliminating the need to assign labels again.

Smart tag suggestions that organise your confidential documents automatically.

• Once you create your own category settings, the system will read the content of the meeting and apply the appropriate tags automatically.
• Eliminating a great deal of manual work in organising documents, you now have a searchable organised database immediately available.

A feature that automatically applies templates based on context for your notes.

• With just a toggle switch, you can enable the system to read what your call was about and format your summary using the template design you prefer.
• This is a huge time-saver since you don't need to find and manually apply templates after a busy day of consecutive calls.

A professional consent notice that provides transparency regarding privacy before your meetings even begin.

• Before your meetings begin, it will send a professional and safe heads-up to your participants 24 hours prior to explain exactly how their privacy will be secured.
• You can also exclude certain email domains so you're not sending a consent notice to your same daily colleagues.

Free and unlimited chat assistant to query all of your meeting history.

• You can search through all of your records or focus down to a single meeting to inquire with no restrictions.
• It functions as a smart assistant that has knowledge of every single piece of information that's been discussed and provides you with an answer immediately.

Highly structured tasks that automatically map out action items and assign them to the correct person.

• The system extracts your next steps from the transcript, assigns them to the relevant participant, and allows you to manage priority levels with ease.
• It eliminates the manual guesswork associated with post-meeting follow-ups.

Sanduni: "The transcription though. Everything is amazingly captured. I didn't even have to lift a finger to identify the speakers."

‍What bugged me

I was very impressed with how accurately all the transcripts had been transcribed; however, I found myself somewhat unenthusiastic regarding the way the final summaries were organised.

Overall, the final meeting summaries appear as a wall of text that is difficult to sift through.

• Don't get me wrong, I did pick the extensive summary option, so I am getting what I genuinely asked for, but there are fewer chapters or topics than I'd like it to have. I wish there were more organisation based on clear story chapters or breaks, so the summary doesn't feel too long and dull when trying to read through it. Though you don't have to anyway, you can just ask Jamie's Ask AI what you need to know, or you can use Jamie's templates to get the best summary according to your exact needs. HOWEVER, this is just my opinion!
• With Jamie, there's always a way to personalize the summaries according to your preferred taste!

Sanduni: "It kinda gets very, very... I don't know if it's because I selected the extended summary but it does get extremely lengthy."

What Jamie users compliment about

Bot-free capture, no awkward bot on the call

"I like Jamie because it's a bot-free AI note-taker that can take notes without an awkward bot on the call." G2

Accurate transcription and well-organized AI summaries

"The transcription is also usually very accurate. I also like the AI summaries it generates after the call - they're well laid out and organized, especially compared to other AI note-takers." G2

A lifesaver for multilingual meetings, even Hebrew, online or in person

"Finally an app that… Understands Hebrew. Jaime is also a life saver for: Multi lingual conversations [and] Offline and online meetings." G2

What Jamie users complain about

Audio capture needed a little mic setup early on (since fixed)

"I had an issue before with recording the meeting notes because my microphone or something was not set up properly. But the latest update now grabs the meeting sounds with no extra configuration." G2

Speaker identification isn't infallible, a good mic gets the best results

"The speaker identification feature of Jamie, though very useful, isn't entirely reliable or infallible. In our experience, to get the most effective results from Jamie, it was necessary to invest in a good quality microphone." G2

A few rough edges and missing integrations, it's still young

"There a few buggy things and missing integrations but Jaime is young and I have full confidence in what their future looks like. It's better than every other app I've tried." G2

2. Granola review: minimalist + bot-free, best for solo and personal notes

Verdict

Overall, Granola is an excellent choice for users seeking a clean, extremely minimalistic environment in which they can record ideas and create beautifully formatted meeting reports. I have found working with this tool to be very enjoyable; the overall design is exceptionally calm and having unlimited meeting notes on the Free version is an awesome benefit for daily, casual conversation purposes.

However, as you enter into serious, high-stakes business meetings with many speakers and large amounts of information being discussed and shared among team members, the shortcomings of this tool become apparent. 

In these situations, Granola will fail to meet your expectations in terms of identifying who has spoken at different points throughout the meeting, maintaining separation between internal/private notes and client-facing meeting notes, and providing long-term storage/searchability for meeting minutes.

• Who it's for: Solopreneurs or teams desiring a distraction-free notebook that creates polished summaries from unpolished hand-written notes, used primarily for low-stakes, everyday conversations.
• Who should think twice: Business professionals conducting important meetings with multiple participants requiring complete accuracy and accountability regarding who made specific comments/observations during the meeting and who had access to confidential/proprietary information contained within the meeting notes.
• The take: If you require a simple, elegant way to turn your own disorganised/unformatted meeting notes into organised/polished formats for everyday use, consider using Granola. However, if you are running meetings where precise identification of individual contributors/speakers and/or segregation of internal/private notes from public/client-facing meeting notes is paramount, I'd prefer looking for an alternative. 

What is Granola?

Granola is a bot-free AI notepad you download on your desktop to capture your meetings and turn them into notes. You take rough notes during the call, and once Granola recognises the call has ended, it automatically generates enhanced notes by pairing your typed notes with the transcript it created during the call, producing structured summaries with action items and decisions.

A fan-favourite feature is Granola's AI Chat, where you can ask questions across all your past meetings, as noted by a user below:

"I LOVE Granola! Being able to sort through meeting history and chat with your notes to access everything that has been said about a particular topic is AMAZING." Product Hunt

The catch is who said what. Granola names speakers from your meeting platform, so on Google Meet through the browser extension, and on Zoom on macOS through Settings, the transcript carries real participant names. Granola's own feature-requests page confirms it shipped, stating directly:

"This was one of our most-requested features, and it's now here."

Everywhere else, including an off-calendar note, the transcript falls back to Me and Them, and the iPhone app labels people Speaker A and Speaker B with no names. Granola also doesn't match a voice to a person across calls. Names come from the meeting platform each time rather than from a stored voice.

Users who actually live through larger meetings feel this, as noted below:

"Speaker identification can also be hit-or-miss, which makes it harder to track who said what in larger meetings." G2

Other than that, the setup is fast, the bot-free capture is genuinely seamless, and once you're in, the workflow can be quite nice. Here's how it held up when I tested it.

Features I tried

Quick Notes

This is a feature you use when you want to start taking notes on an impromptu meeting that isn't set to be on your calendar. I checked this out using a YouTube video of a couple talking. Once you're done recording, Quick Notes creates a summary, and the transcript sits under the note behind the waveform button next to the chat bar, labelled Show transcript. The drawback is speaker identification: Granola's own Quick Note screen says it will transcribe but will not know who is speaking, so every line came back under one label.

With no way to tell who is saying what, you are left with a large chunk of text that you will need to spend time figuring out who said what, which is extremely tedious and takes away from being able to pay attention to the content of the conversation.

Recipes

Recipes are essentially pre-made prompts designed to enable creating quick content, or quickly getting insight from the meetings. Many users utilise a common prompt named "What Did I Miss," if they doze off to catch up on what they missed during a meeting. 

As well, Recipes utilises a marketplace (that appears attractive) allowing you to pick through numerous options such as "Make Me Sound Smart," "Suggest Questions," etc., and even allow you to create your own. 

When I ran a funny recipe against my test meeting, it created something totally nonsensical, however I tried a second one created by Ruben Hassid that produced a LinkedIn post brief, and that one worked pretty awesome. 

Creating content outside of your meeting notes utilising recipes is an excellent method; you simply need to be aware of which ones you decide to run.

Notepad

This is a built in scratch pad where you may jot down ideas whilst the tool transcribes in the background. This operates similar to a typical Markdown text editor, therefore you can write a # sign to produce headers and organise your ideas under various subjects. 

The thought behind Notepad is that you write small, hasty notes during the meeting, and then click on the "Enhance Notes" button to combine the manual jottings you made with the background transcript to produce one nice and complete document. 

Although having space to take notes is good, I have mixed emotions regarding the delivery of this feature. 

If you write private thoughts, internal strategies, or sensitive client data on your pad, they will be incorporated and blended directly into the finished polished meeting summaries that you will eventually send to clients, which is unprofessional if you ever plan on sharing the client-facing summaries later.

Templates

These are pre-defined formats that you may apply to your meeting notes after the recording stops to format them in a particular manner. I observed several defaults shown on screen (such as an interviewing template and a user interview layout that separates notes into structured categories like objectives, issues and present answers). 

Templates appear useful if you require maintaining consistency in your documentation amongst all of your interviews with candidates or customer calls so that you may easily compare later; nevertheless, the negative aspect of Templates is that the actions generated by Templates are elementary. 

You receive a listing of things to accomplish next, but none of the listings contain priority levels, deadlines or ways to delegate them to other individuals, requiring you to handle all of the follow-up tasks yourself.

AI Chat

The chat interface lets users ask questions about the history of meetings. The chat interface is another method by which the user can interact with the meeting transcript and get the information they need from the transcript once the call is over.

Integrations

Share your completed meeting notes with the apps you already use in your day-to-day business. While the native integration possibilities are limited on the basic free version of Granola, there's a direct connection to Slack, plus the Granola MCP connector, which every plan gets and which plugs your notes into Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor. Otherwise it includes some rudimentary methods of sharing such as an email option; copy/paste into your clipboard; copy/paste URL To integrate Granola with other applications, you will have to go through Zapier, and that may require you to have a certain level of technical sophistication to create the zap.

Advanced AI Models

In addition to the standard 'Auto', Granola gives you a choice among the premium models. There's Sonnet 4.6, GPT-5.4, and GPT-5.5, and then there are the Opus 4.8, Fable 5, and Gemini 3.1 Pro models, along with their thinking versions. These are available when you pay for a plan and therefore I chose to remain on the free Auto plan and did not test these.

How much does Granola cost?

• Basic: $0 free per user per month
• Business: $14 per user per month
• Enterprise: $35 per user per month

Gentle reminder: pricing may change, please double-check on Granola's official pricing page.

What I loved

Overall, Granola works very well at creating an experience around the feeling of using the product and helping users create content from meetings.

A peaceful, expansive workspace that is aesthetically pleasing and minimal.

• The aesthetic is quite pleasant to look at; there's plenty of clean whitespace and colours aren't overly taxing on the eye.
• Using it is also enjoyable when I'm looking for something clean and free from distractions, with not a lot of clutter going on.

Creative Recipes for transforming meetings into content.

• Those creative Recipes are a great addition, especially since others are able to share their own templates to take those raw transcripts and turn them into other formats (like structured LinkedIn briefs).
• The fact that the AI chat can be accessed unlimited times through the free version allows for easy discovery of your conversations and obtaining the exact desired output.

Meeting recording without a bot is definitely a benefit to the user experience.

• No visible bot joins the meeting, therefore there is less likelihood of having that "creepy" feeling associated with a bot joining the call.
• The green dancing bars provide confidence that the audio is capturing correctly without being intrusive.

Sanduni: "It feels really nice. It feels really good. Um, and the calming colors, colors are really calming. Uh, minimalistic, so much white spaces and not, not too much going on..."

What bugged me

Although Granola does have a visually appealing design, there are many limitations within Granola that made me believe that Granola may not be ready for business use or professional meetings.

Lack of speaker identity (for in-person meetings) creates a mess of trying to determine who said what after the meeting is over.

• In my testing of the Quick Notes feature with a YouTube video of 2 different speakers, it did not indicate which one spoke.
• In this Quick Note capture the transcript carried no voice labels, so I had to work out which speaker said each line myself.
• For those needing a clear and accurate copy of a meeting, this lack of detail is extremely disappointing.

I don't think merging your private notepad into your final summary is safe.

• How your private notebook is "enhanced" and then combined into the final summary produces serious concerns about privacy.
• Your personal notes, potential lead info, names, etc., that you've written in your scratchpad could now appear in the section intended for your client.
• That separation between your private thinking and the shared record of your meeting seems unprofessional for meetings where there are high stakes involved.

Some community-submitted prompts produced nonsensical results during my testing.

• The joke recipe, for instance, didn't apply or make sense during my meeting.
• I couldn't even identify how the anecdote applied to our discussion.

Next steps were extremely basic for serious work in my testing.

• In my test the next steps came back with no priority levels and no due dates, though Granola does document extracting owners and due dates from the transcript.
• Granola lets you reassign the owner on a generated action item, but I couldn't find a priority field or a way to mark one complete.

The free plan has a short memory

• The free Basic plan only shows the last 30 days of meeting history in the app. Older notes are kept rather than deleted, and they come back if you upgrade, but they are out of reach while you stay on free.

Sanduni: "Granola will transcribe the quick note, but you will not know who is speaking."

What Granola users compliment about 

Bot-free presence keeps the conversation human

"background without joining as a bot or recording audio means I can actually be present in conversations. No awkward 'there's a bot in this call' energy." G2

Summaries that surface decisions and action items, not raw dumps

"The summaries it produces are actually good, not just a raw transcript dump, but key insights and actions." G2

Cross-device capture between Mac and iPhone for catch-ups on the go

"It transcribes both on my Mac and iPhone, which is a game-changer for on-the-go catch-ups." G2

What Granola users complain about

Speakers blur together, and the transcript misses words

"the transcript isn't completely accurate. It also doesn't always distinguish between different voices, so it can be unclear who is speaking." G2

Details slip through, and this user wanted the whole transcript surfaced

"It does not capture all meeting details. It would be nice if it can provide an entire transcript of our meetings so you would know in case it misses something, especially if the meeting is quite lengthy." G2

No native Slack or email send, copy-paste to share summaries

"I'd like to have little buttons in Granola for automated actions, like a Slack button to generate a message or an email button for a formatted email. It'd be nice to connect directly to Slack for sending meeting summaries." G2

Leaning toward Granola?

See how Granola and Jamie stack up side by side in our Jamie vs Granola breakdown.

3. Fathom review: fast and hands-on, but busy, best for online-only video teams

Verdict

If you work all day with Zoom, Google Meet, or Teams as your primary video call platforms and would like an AI note-taker that feels completely native to your desktop experience, then Fathom can be a good option. 

If you also enjoy being hands-on in meetings, clicking a button to highlight important parts of the call or sending feedback in real time to Slack, then this is another good fit.

However, if you hold in-person meetings or you would simply rather stay engaged in the conversation without monitoring a sidebar of bright highlight buttons, Fathom will fall short. 

I personally didn't love the heavy emphasis on sharing, and the points-and-raffle system to encourage participation felt excessive; on top of that, the most limiting thing is that even basic functionality like auto-generated action items sits behind a paid plan. 

It's frustrating when you just want a simple, private record of your own notes from the meeting.

• Who it's for: Active Zoom and Teams users who want to manually tag highlights during the call and sync everything straight into their CRM or Slack while it's still happening.
• Who should think twice: Anyone who runs a lot of in-person meetings, or who would rather stay present on a call without clicking "positive reaction," "feedback," and "needs review" buttons while trying to maintain eye contact.
• The take: It's a powerful tool for remote teams who love to live-tag their calls, but its complete lack of in-person support and its heavy push to share your notes with every attendee make it a bit of a hassle for everyone else.

What is Fathom?

Fathom is an AI note taker for Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams, known for an unusually generous free plan, unlimited recording and transcription with no time cap, on both bot and bot-free capture. 

It writes summaries and action items the moment a call ends, and leans into sales coaching with a feature called AI Scorecards that grades rep calls against a rubric.

Plenty of users say it quietly does the heavy lifting for them:

"What I like most about Fathom is how it turns client calls into structured, actionable summaries. As a lifecycle manager, it helps me keep track of feedback, priorities, and next steps without missing anything, which makes a big difference when managing multiple campaigns." G2

The one thing it trips on is the same as most tools, uncommon words and thick accents:

"sometimes it will misinterpret a word or two if it is not common or with thick accents. Otherwise, I love everything about Fathom." G2

Features I tried

Desktop App

I installed the desktop version of Fathom for Mac. The user interface did feel a little tight to begin with, like all of the features were packed into a small window. 

Once a meeting begins, the desktop app will automatically detect a meeting and request to take notes.

Live Summaries

I noticed this feature demonstrated during their walkthrough, where the AI creates a summary of the discussion while you continue speaking.

This feature is meant to allow you to quickly glance at the live summary if you become disoriented by losing your train of thought or if the conversation is moving too rapidly.

It also appears next to the video feed, so you don't have to wait until the end of the meeting to view the key points.

Highlights and Bookmarks

These are essentially flags that you use to indicate important parts of the meeting.

There are different types of buttons that include "positive reaction," "feedback," and "needs review," and once clicked, these buttons capture that portion of the conversation, regardless of whether you click them before or after the speaker began speaking.

I found it visually overwhelming. The bright, colour-labelled buttons popping onto my screen while I try to pay attention to someone's facial expression feels very distracting.

Ask Fathom

Their AI chat application is embedded inside the app and allows users to ask questions regarding their completed meetings.

You can ask Fathom questions to create specific answers from your discussions, and you can decide whether to search across your personal calls or across all of your teams' calls.

They state that Fathom is intended to be available at the instant a meeting concludes, allowing you to receive insight without having to dig through a full transcript.

CRM Sync

They connect to tools such as Salesforce and HubSpot to automatically add your call notes and summaries to the correct record in those systems.

How much does Fathom cost?

• Free: $0 free per user per month
• Premium (Individual): $20 per user per month
• Team: $19 per user per month
• Business: $34 per user per month

Gentle reminder: pricing may change, please double-check on Fathom's official pricing page.

What I loved

The fact is, although I had many complaints with regard to the format of this app, there were several times throughout the process that the developers' design and support did impress me.

Introductory video: the art form that blows me away.

• I was astounded by how visually appealing and beautiful the space-like opening video was when I launched the application.
• At first glance, the professionalism of the opening experience felt high-end.

Live crash course daily is a big win for anyone who wants to master the tool.

• I discovered that the team has an almost nightly tips and tricks webinar that can help with customer success.
• The level of support from a company who is actively involved in assisting you learn the fundamental aspects as well as best practices of their product is tremendous.

Speed of recording ready for viewing is unbelievable.

• When compared to other applications that take twenty minutes to generate a video recording, the speed of generating a recording ready for viewing within about five seconds is incredible.
• The reason why this is such a big deal for me is because I don't want to have to sit here for thirty minutes waiting for a video recording of my last meeting.

Sanduni: "It's so pretty. It's so seamless. It's so beautiful. I am in love with it." (I am talking about the Onboarding space video)

What bugged me

Being forced to stay hands-on with bright buttons during calls is a total distraction from the person I am talking to.

• I thought the overall interface, with all of its flashing label indicators like "positive reaction" and "needs review," was distracting and difficult to ignore.
• It appears as though I am expected to produce something as opposed to simply engaging in conversation, and that would be infuriating for me in a real-time meeting.

The overall experience feels like a casino where all the points and raffle tickets are popping up.

• I was not a fan of how the app gamifies everything, giving you points for inviting others and utilising features to win Amazon gift cards.
• It made the software feel less like a professional tool and more like a marketing machine that is always upselling.

What Fathom users compliment about

Comprehensive notes from every Zoom, Meet, or Teams call

"What I really like about Fathom is how accessible it is in terms of having it join a variety of meetings to take notes, both comprehensive and summarized." G2

Automatic summaries with key takeaways and action items

"It simplifies how we capture and revisit meetings by automatically producing accurate summaries, key takeaways, and action items." G2

Recordings act as a source of truth for every meeting

"I find Fathom invaluable for recording meetings with our clients as well as internal meetings. Each Fathom recording acts as a source of truth for what was said during a meeting, eliminating inefficiencies that commonly arose afterwards." G2

What Fathom users complain about

Transcripts struggle with thick accents and people talking over each other

"being based in Europe means I work with clients who often have strong Irish, Northern Irish, or Scottish accents. Fathom occasionally struggles to transcribe these accurately compared to standard American or English accents. I have also noticed that if people talk over one another, the system sometimes misses a speaker." G2

Paid tiers get pricey, and the desktop app can lag

"The pricing is high for a regular user. the overall performance of the desktop app lags a bit and is sluggish at times." G2

The layout feels off, and meeting alerts can be missed

"The UI layout is a bit weird for me. I also don't always receive a notification for a meeting that's about to begin, whether the app/extension is open or not." G2

Leaning toward Fathom?

See how Fathom and Jamie stack up side by side in our Jamie vs Fathom breakdown.

4. Fireflies review: feature-packed and innovative, but bot-heavy; best for automation-loving teams

Verdict

If you want a meeting note taker that does more than just appear in your meetings, then Fireflies is a great option, especially if you are in sales or consulting and you really need a tool that will act as a full-blown AI employee to assist you with the busy work, such as answering questions about previous deals or running discovery calls for you using your new voice agents.

However, if you need to run low-profile meetings, the fact that Fireflies sends a bot into your call (by default) may seem too loud. Although Fireflies now provides both a desktop app and a Chrome extension to record without a bot.

• Who it's for: Teams who want a high-energy AI assistant that integrates with everything and proactively surfaces insights or even handles calls on their behalf.
• Who should think twice: People who need a discreet way to record sensitive conversations without a bot participant potentially distracting other people in the room.
• The take: If you are looking for a high-energy AI employee that lives in your workflow, then keep it. If not, skip it, because you'd prefer a tool that stays out of sight and out of mind.

What is Fireflies?

Fireflies is a conversation-intelligence AI note taker built around a bot named Fred that joins your calls as a participant, transcribes everything, and layers analytics on top: speaker talk-time, sentiment, topic trackers, and a directory of 200+ AI skills aimed mostly at sales teams.

Users rave about how much busywork it clears off their plate:

"The automated meeting summaries and action-item extraction are absolutely fantastic." G2

But in that same five-star review, the user flags the thing that might give you pause if an uninvited bot would unsettle you:

"The bot's auto-join behavior can feel pretty aggressive by default. If you're not extremely careful with your calendar permissions and your Fireflies dashboard settings, it may end up joining private 1-on-1s meetings uninvited, which can be awkward." G2

Features I tried

Meeting Bot

This is the main way Fireflies gets into your calls. When you sign up, you see all the options for how the bot (which they call Fred) joins your meetings. You can set it to automatically join every meeting with a link, only meetings you own, or only when you specifically invite it. It shows up in the participant list as "Fireflies.ai Note Taker" and captures everything in real time. It is standard for these tools, however it is very visible to everyone else in the meeting, which is something to consider if you are trying to stay low-key.

Desktop App

I downloaded the Mac version to see how it handled things differently. It sits on your computer and can actually detect when a meeting starts. The cool part about this one is that it gives you a choice: either invite the bot for the full experience or use "Record" mode. 

If you just hit record, it uses your device audio to capture the meeting without a bot showing up in the participant list at all. The trade-off is that you lose speaker labels and video recording if you go the no-bot route, but it is a good backup option if you need a more private way to get a transcript.

Live Assist

A floating panel pops up on your screen during a live meeting. It is like a little dashboard where you can see the transcript scroll by in real time and check out "AI Notes" that capture key points as they happen. It also has a "Catch Me Up" feature that summarises what happened so far, a huge help if you are running a few minutes late. The panel also includes a scratch pad for your own notes and a collapsible timer so it does not get in the way of your screen.

Ask Fred

Ask Fred is their AI search and conversational tool. It is a robust product, allowing you to query the current meeting using phrases such as "what were the main takeaways" or "when did we discuss price."

However, it is far beyond that capability. You may utilise Ask Fred to search through all previous meetings. If you would like to identify trends in the major blockers of the meetings you attended this week, simply ask it, and it will retrieve those answers from your entire meeting history. 

In essence, it is like having a personal assistant who remembers every word spoken during every conversation you have ever had.

Voice Agents

I found Voice Agents to be a particularly impressive feature because it represents an entirely new approach. Rather than record a meeting and then manually review the audio, you can now assign an AI agent to facilitate the meeting for you. 

They have templates for common types of meetings, including screening interviews and discovery calls. All you need to do is provide a link, and the agent will manage the conversation by asking pre-determined questions and facilitating the discussion in a natural manner. 

The agent can even replicate your voice to sound exactly like you. I believe this is an excellent example of innovation, particularly for repetitive tasks such as conducting surveys for employee feedback or checking in with clients for the first time.

AI Skills

AI skills are essentially specialised applications that you can apply to your meeting data to gather unique insights. There are currently hundreds available in the skill repository, covering topics ranging from generating a content calendar from a strategy call to determining whether a sales call included all aspects of your company's brand voice. 

Recruiters can use AI skills to evaluate potential candidate responses or generate automated follow-up email communications based on transcripts. Overall, it seems like a way to convert a raw transcript into a completed professional document without requiring significant effort.

Integrations

Fireflies integrates with over 100 systems, which is incredible. Users may sync their meeting summaries with CRM systems such as HubSpot or Salesforce, create tasks immediately in Jira/Asana, or integrate with Slack, Notion, and Google Drive. It also supports Zapier and N8N, so if users have a specific workflow that requires integrating Fireflies into that flow to forward meeting data to other systems, Fireflies should be able to accommodate that requirement.

How much does Fireflies cost?

• Free: $0 free per seat per month
• Pro: $18 per seat per month
• Business: $29 per seat per month
• Enterprise: $39 per seat per month

Gentle reminder: pricing may change, please double-check on Fireflies' official pricing page.

What I loved

There is something about the overall vibe of the platform that feels energetic and new-age, almost too cool for school, that made it feel much bigger than just a voice recorder.

The voice agents are a total game changer for dealing with repeated calls without having to be there.

• It's an awesome way to scale yourself creatively. This could be ideal for surveying customers with feedback on their purchases, etc., or screening applicants for open positions.
• The thing that blew me away was the fact that you can also create clones of your own voice so the agent will steer the conversation, ask the necessary questions, etc., sounding exactly like you.

The interface does an excellent job of grabbing your attention and keeping things organised.

• Overall, everything looks super modern and fun, especially how the upcoming meetings appear as soon as you sign in.
• Unlike other apps that simply show you a list of your files, it keeps things fresh and visually appealing.

Having a personal assistant that can search across every single meeting is extremely powerful.

• Searching through all of your past calls to answer a simple question and having the AI retrieve those answers is a huge time saver.
• Rather than digging through hours of audio records to find a particular problem or trend, you can instantly locate it using the search function.

Sanduni: "10 out of 10 for this amazing, innovative feature."

What bugged me

The platform feels like it was built around a bot that you cannot get rid of easily.

• There is literally no option within the settings to transcribe a meeting without Fred the bot joining as a participant.
• Even though they do offer a Chrome extension and a desktop application that allows local recording, the primary web experience requires you to have a bot visible in order to use all of its capabilities.

How upcoming meetings were displayed gave me some unwanted anxiety.

• As soon as you click the "upcoming meetings" toggle, it brings up a message stating you have a meeting in five minutes (which isn't true) and freaks you out unnecessarily.
• Once I finally clicked on it, I had meetings scheduled for Friday or next week and not a meeting that was today. 

What Fireflies users compliment about

Auto-records and transcribes every call so manual note-taking disappears

"What I like most about Fireflies.ai is that it automatically records, transcribes, and summarizes meetings, which ends up saving me a lot of time." G2

Pulls the to-dos out of every call so your weekly task list builds itself

"It also pulls out the to-dos from the meeting, and helps me create my personal to-do list for the week." G2

Pushes meeting recaps into Slack and CRM without copy-paste

"It automatically pushes meeting recaps straight to our Slack channels and logs transcripts into our CRM." G2

What Fireflies users complain about

A crowd of bots staring back when everyone runs a notetaker

"the bot is asking permission to join the meetings... this is like this person's note takers from five places taking notes. On my screen I am seeing like six people I am talking to, which is not really looking nice." G2

Transcripts go wrong on accents and shift what was actually said

"Sometimes the transcriptions are totally wrong and change the correct meaning of the things discussed in the meeting." G2

Advanced features locked behind higher tiers can pile up over time

"some of the more advanced features are restricted to higher pricing tiers, which can become costly over time." G2

Leaning toward Fireflies?

See how Fireflies and Jamie stack up side by side in our Jamie vs Fireflies breakdown.

5. Otter review: powerful control, but a stressful setup, best for CRM-driven sales teams

Verdict

If you are someone who actually likes having a meeting bot join your calls, and you really want to micromanage exactly which calendar events your AI assistant slides into, Otter gives you a massive level of control right from the start. It is a solid choice for teams that live inside their CRM and want to automatically feed highly structured summaries and templates straight into their sales pipelines.

But if you are like me and the very thought of a visible bot crashing your sensitive discussions makes you cringe, this tool quickly starts to feel like a massive headache. Between the stressful onboarding toggles to prevent it from accidentally sharing your private meeting notes with external guests and the constant threat of putting up awkward signup walls for your partners, the setup process alone can feel like a high-wire act where one wrong click compromises your privacy.

• Who it's for: Teams who want a highly customisable bot that they can manually control, especially sales outfits that rely on structured templates and CRM integrations to keep track of every conversation.
• Who should think twice: Anyone who demands absolute privacy, hates the disruptive presence of a meeting bot, or cannot afford the risk of accidental note-sharing and pushy signup walls blocking their external clients.
• The take: Keep it if you love deep customisation and sales-specific insights, but skip it if you want your meetings to stay strictly private and bot-free without the constant stress of managing complex sharing settings.

What is Otter AI?

Otter is an AI meeting assistant for Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams that transcribes your calls, writes summaries and action items, and lets you ask questions across your meetings. It can record either with a bot that joins the call or bot-free from your desktop, and it leans heavily on templates and team sharing.

That team sharing side is where a lot of users say they get the most out of Otter:

"Otter.ai automatically transcribes meetings and conversations, saving me hours of taking note-taking every week. I can highlight key points, add comments, and easily share transcripts with my team, which keeps everyone on the same page." G2

However, things do get a little shaky when you are facing a meeting with multiple people. Many users have noted that Otter cannot filter voices apart quite as meticulously as it's supposed to, which I will be putting to the test in a little while, but for now, here's a user claiming a similar case;

"I've noticed that when I use Otter.ai during conference talks, it doesn't always distinguish clearly between different speakers. It also frequently assigns the wrong name to a voice, so I end up spending more time than I'd like going back and editing the transcript." G2

Features I tried

Bot-free desktop recording

Otter offers a downloadable application on your computer that allows you to record meetings without the actual presence of a bot in the call.

It captures audio coming from your computer, including audio captured with headsets.

Meeting Templates and Custom Insights

Otter has meeting templates that help structure your summaries based on the type of discussion.

When you select one (such as sales discovery or user research), Otter will automatically extract very specific information from the summary.

You may also customise sections to automatically generate Custom Insights or automatically send completed summaries to specified channels.

Otter Chat

This is a conversational interface allowing you to ask it anything related to your previous meetings. Depending on the context, there are two modes:

Inside of a particular meeting, you can use it to get the key takeaways or evaluate how well a certain speaker performed. Additionally, you can ask it to look across multiple meetings and then show you the top thing all users liked in all of those combined interviews.

It quickly shows you the results, provides links to the meeting(s) referenced and lets you navigate directly to the actual conversation(s) where you can verify the numbers/stats.

Real-time speaker labelling

The software labels speakers in real time by identifying which individual is speaking and tagging their respective speaker bubbles.

If the software incorrectly identifies a speaker, or if you wish to add a new speaker to a previously recorded call, you can manually enter the speaker's name using your calendar invite or workspace directory listing.

Once a speaker is correctly labelled ("Richard") once, the tool should recognise and continue to label subsequent lines spoken by that same person.

However, because Otter does not currently support long-term speaker recognition (i.e., automatic identification of voice patterns across multiple unrelated meetings), you will likely have to manually retag the same person every time they appear in a future meeting.

Action items, CRM sync, and Slack

Your CRM is synced with all of your meeting summaries, along with your transcript highlights and next steps, via this integration.

As such, this product intends to maintain your pipeline up-to-date at all times in the background and avoid wasting hours manually summarising and copying data post-call.

Imports

In terms of importing files, the basic plan limits you to a maximum of 3 audio/video files. Unlimited import options are available in the Business plan.

Languages

The default-language menu includes UK English, Spanish, French, Japanese, Chinese and German.

How much does Otter cost?

• Basic: $0 free per user per month, limited, including only 3 file imports
• Pro: from $16.99 per user per month
• Business: $30 per user per month

Gentle reminder: pricing may change, please double-check on Otter's official pricing page.

What I loved

Even though I am not a big fan of bots, there were a couple of smart features in Otter that really stood out to me.

Getting full control over exactly when and where the meeting assistant shows up is a major win.

• Having the ability to manually select which specific calendar events the bot joins gives me a lot of peace of mind.
• It means you can keep the assistant completely out of your sensitive, high-stakes discussions and only deploy it when you actually want it there.

Being able to query all of your past meetings at once makes finding specific details incredibly easy.

• The search chat doesn't just look at one conversation; it can scan across all your saved interviews or calls in a channel to pull out trends.
• It gives you direct references that you can click straight through to, so you can quickly double-check your facts and numbers without scrolling for hours.

Sanduni: "So, if you are someone who likes bots who joins a meeting, this is actually nice, that you have the option to manually send a bot."

What bugged me

Right from the start, navigating the onboarding and the sharing settings felt incredibly stressful and complicated.

Trying to figure out how to stop the bot from accidentally sharing private notes is an absolute headache.

• The setup forces you to wade through a maze of confusing options about who gets to see your summaries, making you analyze the domain names of your calendar guests just to keep your data secure.
• It adds so much unnecessary stress to a busy day when you just want your sensitive conversations to stay completely private by default.

Telling to invite your teammates and upgrade during setup feels incredibly pushy.

• The app somehow pulled up all of my colleagues' email addresses and tried to get me to invite them to my workspace before I could even try the tool out.
• You have to manually deselect every single person just to protect your team's inbox and skip past their aggressive prompts.

Sanduni: "I do not want too much stress in my life. That's something that I would be concerned about. For me, like, when I look at this, I got too much stress just looking at the options that I'm seeing right now."

What Otter users compliment about

Tags voices correctly even when half your team is in the conference room

"I like that I can record meetings where multiple participants are in a conference room and others are remote and it still tags each voice correctly." G2

Clean interface that plays nicely with the platforms you already use

"I really like Otter.ai's interface and the simplicity of its use. It's very easy to use, and I don't have to do much to utilize the technology." G2

Meeting Agent stays in the call and writes the action items the moment it ends

"I love that it stays in the meeting as a participant, listens to all the conversations, and afterwards gives me a summary outline, which includes what to do and what not to do, along with the action items of the meeting." G2

What Otter users complain about

Accents and overlapping voices make transcript accuracy slip in big calls

"transcription accuracy drops when there is background noise, overlapping conversations, or strong accents, which means the notes still require some manual editing." G2

Paid tiers can get expensive when you start adding seats

"It's expensive compared other options, but I think it's 100% worth it." G2

Free version caps conversations at 30 minutes and limits storage

"with the free version, conversations are limited to 30 minutes. There is also a limited storage capacity in the free version." G2

Leaning toward Otter?

See how Otter and Jamie stack up side by side in our Jamie vs Otter breakdown.

So which AI note taker should you actually pick?

Firstly, there isn't a clear "winner" that fits all. The correct choice depends entirely on whether a tool aligns with your needs. Here's a simple guide to help you decide quickly:

• Jamie: best when accuracy and privacy matter most, for confidential, high-stakes, or number-heavy meetings where you need CRM integrations and agentic skills that go beyond your meeting notes and do automated work outside your notes for you. It's a bot-free solution that captures recordings locally, and it took the #1 position in our testing in all three categories, transcription, summary, and speaker identification. If you were the user who did that example meeting in the test, you didn't even have to lift a finger to identify the speakers. (The only AI note-taker who identified the speakers, by the way)
• Fathom: the best free plan and back-to-back Zoom, Meet, or Teams calls, but in the free plan, it only offers free transcriptions and summaries; action items are only offered in the paid plan, and the app is quite gamified. If you don't mind a gamified application (raffles and points), this might be the one for you; even the in-meeting experience contains interactive buttons that, in my opinion, take away the focus from the person in front of you. 
• Otter: CRM-based teams; it provides structure, and summaries can be sent automatically into your CRM pipeline. It also generates high quality meeting notes according to our test, the only downside was the speaker identification was not fully automatic in in-person meetings, and you will have to identify them yourself for in-person meetings. 
• Fireflies: an automation-centric assistant that plugs into everything and can even run calls for you. Truly innovative features lie in Fireflies like AI voice agents, but quality- and accuracy-wise, Fireflies could use some improvement. And please remember, you won't get to download transcription or any action items in Fireflie's free plan.
• Granola: a simple notepad, ideal for low-stakes solo meetings; It names speakers on Google Meet and Zoom on the desktop, but an off-calendar capture falls back to Me and Them, and the iPhone app labels people Speaker A and Speaker B. It has a very unique recipe feature, though, which is very innovative. Accuracy-wise, it captured all the key information for an aesthetically pleasing note-taker!

You'll want to weigh four key factors when evaluating these options:

• Accuracy: how accurately the tool captures what was actually said, the transcript, the summary, and who said what.
• Bot-free capture: do you want a bot to join your call, or a bot-free recording taken straight from your device?
• Privacy: how private is your meeting content, and where is it stored?
• Price: what is your budget for the option you choose?

The questions I get asked about AI note takers

Are free AI note takers any good?

Yes, genuinely. Most of these AI note taking tools run on advanced AI models and handle the core features for you, turning a call into accurate transcripts, a clean summary, and an auto-formatted task list without manual note-taking. Several offer a permanent free plan or free tier that's solid for everyday use. The gaps tend to show up in the limits (meeting caps, storage, time) and in harder things like speaker recognition.

Which is the most accurate?

In our test on the same recording, Jamie scored highest overall, especially on speaker recognition and meeting transcription. Fireflies and Otter produced solid, accurate transcripts on the text, and Fathom nailed the numbers but struggled to separate speakers, so the important details about who said what got lost. Every score is in our scoring and receipts doc so you can check it yourself.

Do any work without a bot joining the call?

Yes. Jamie and Granola are bot-free by design, they record straight from your device audio, so nothing shows up in the participant list, which works for both virtual meetings and in person conversations. Otter, Fireflies, and Fathom can also record bot-free from their desktop apps, though some features like speaker labels may drop on the no-bot route. If in person transcription for client meetings matters, check the tool captures room audio, not just call audio, Fathom, for example, is online only.

Can they answer questions across all my past meetings?

Yes, this is where cross meeting (or multi meeting) intelligence comes in. All five let you chat with an AI assistant for instant answers, not just within one call but across your whole history of searchable transcripts. Jamie's Ask AI is free and unlimited, Fireflies has Ask Fred, and Otter and Fathom have their own versions, so you can ask "what did we decide about X" and get the answer without scrolling.

Is my meeting data private?

It varies, so read each tool's policy. Jamie is built in Germany and GDPR-compliant: your audio recording is deleted once your notes are ready, everything is encrypted on EU servers, and your data is never used for AI training. With others, watch the defaults around auto-sharing notes with attendees and merging private notes into shared records.

How much do they cost?

All five have a free tier. Cheapest paid tiers, billed monthly: Granola from $14, Otter from $16.99, Fireflies from $18, Fathom from $19, Jamie from €25. These are subscriptions, not a one-time payment, and prices change, so check each tool's official pricing page.

Related reading

• Still torn between the two private, bot-free options? See Jamie vs Granola side by side.
• Weighing the bot-heavy route? Here's how Fireflies compares to Jamie, feature by feature.
• Live in video calls all day? Read Jamie vs Fathom before you commit.
• Looking hardest at the CRM-heavy pick? Our Jamie vs Otter breakdown goes deep.
• Want the full picture? See our best AI meeting assistants roundup.