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As of 13 August 2026, AI can take notes during a meeting.
This still needs a person who signs their name to it.
Can you do it?
2 minutesto a draft.
15 minutesto something you’d act on.
Cost, all in£0
Skill needednone
Who has to check ityou
What the alternative costsA professional minute-taker or admin support to attend and write notes costs £25 to £50 per hour.
If this goes wrong: a decision is misrecorded or a key action is missed, and you catch it in review or a colleague corrects the record in a follow-up message.
What to actually do
Hand it to a person
The route this page recommends
A person who owns the outcome does this end to end, worth it when the failure is dear.
Do it yourself
Second choiceA chat interface, no skill needed, and roughly 15 minutes until you can act on the result.
How to actually do it
- Open your meeting tool (Zoom, Teams or Google Meet) and the AI notetaker simultaneously; most tools integrate directly into the video call.
- Paste the prompt above into the tool's settings or initial instruction field if it accepts custom instructions, or rely on the tool's default mode.
- Start the meeting and the recording at the same time; the AI listens from the beginning.
- Conduct the meeting normally; do not adjust your speech or pace for the AI.
- At the end, wait for the tool to finish transcribing (usually complete within two minutes of the call ending).
- Review the transcript and formatted notes for accuracy, particularly decisions, action owners and dates; correct any mishearings or garbled text.
- Copy the corrected notes into your meeting record or email and share with attendees within one hour while the meeting is fresh.
- Ask attendees to flag any errors or missing items in a reply; update the record if corrections come back.
Prompt
Record and transcribe this meeting. As notes are transcribed, identify: 1) all decisions made, with who made them; 2) all actions assigned, with owner and due date; 3) any risks or blockers mentioned. Format as: DECISIONS / ACTIONS / RISKS. Omit pleasantries and small talk. If someone speaks unclearly, note [unclear] rather than guess.
Open it prefilled in ChatGPT or Claude, or copy it into Gemini, which takes no prefill link.
Use a tool built for this
The distant third
What it gets wrong
- Cannot distinguish who said what if multiple people speak at once or the audio is poor; you must step in to clarify ownership of statements after the fact.
- Misses unspoken context: a decision that was made but not explicitly stated as such will not be flagged as a decision, so you must know the meeting well enough to spot the gap.
- Will not follow up actions by itself; you must still assign, track and chase completion, which is the hard part of meeting administration.
- Cannot know which point in the meeting was most important; all statements are weighted equally, so trivial comments get the same formatting as critical ones.
Even on a YES, the friction has a name: verification cost and context depth.
How we scored this
Five axes, each scored nought to two by hand: ten means AI carries the task cleanly, and the thresholds that turn a total into YES, PARTLY or NO are published in the methodology. Each axis name links to its definition.
| Axis | Score (0–2) |
|---|---|
| Output | 2 |
| Inputs | 2 |
| Verification | 1 |
| Liability | 2 |
| Effort delta | 2 |
| Total | 9 / 10 |
The methodology and its thresholds are published in full.
FAQ
- Can AI take notes as good as a human admin?
- For transcription and formatting, yes; for judgement, no. A human spots that a throwaway remark was actually a critical decision, knows who is likely to forget an action, and can chase follow-up. AI records what was said faithfully but treats all statements the same. Review the notes yourself within the same day.
- Will the AI notetaker distract people in the meeting?
- No. The tool runs silently in the background; participants do not know it is recording unless you tell them. You do need to tell attendees if you are recording, as it may be required by company policy or data protection rules.
- What happens if the AI mishears something important?
- You catch it in review and correct it before sending notes out. The transcript is timestamped, so you can jump back to the audio to check a disputed point. If you miss an error and it goes out, a colleague will usually spot it and reply-all with the correction.
- Is it free to use an AI notetaker?
- Yes. Free-tier tools like Otter.ai and Fathom cover most needs without charging. Paid tiers unlock higher-quality summaries, more storage or better search, but the basic record-and-transcribe function is available free.
Nearby answers
Assessed by claude-haiku-4-5 (claude-haiku-4-5-20251001) on 2026-08-13, second-checked by an independent model. Wrong somewhere? Email [email protected] and it gets re-checked.
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