Preparing an agenda, organizing notes, and scheduling meetings—all of this takes up significant time. But once the meeting starts, the real struggle begins. You try to capture notes while paying attention and keeping up with the conversation. At best, you end up with half-baked notes, and then you have to spend additional time organizing and summarizing them before sending them out to your team members.
I don’t know about you, but this sounds tedious to me.
AI meeting assistants can help offload admin tasks and automate day-to-day activities such as note-taking, summarizing updates, creating tasks from action items, personalizing emails, and follow-up tasks—so you can reclaim your precious time and go back to participating in meetings without any distraction.
Based on my first-hand experience using AI meeting assistants for a while now, I’ve curated a list of the 5 best AI meeting assistants that offer robust integration capabilities, a wide variety of AI features, and at least either a freemium or free plan. Let’s go.
Top 5 AI Meeting Assistants To Consider In 2024
- Avoma — for most advanced AI note-taking features
- Otter — for generating instant answers to questions
- Fireflies.ai — for team collaboration
- tl;dv — for AI-powered search
- Fathom — for basic transcription & summarization
1. Avoma
If you’re looking for an AI meeting assistant to streamline your entire meeting workflow—from preparing an agenda, scheduling meetings, automatically recording and transcribing meetings, generating AI-powered notes, and creating follow-up tasks—Avoma is the tool you need to look into.
Key features of Avoma:
- Organized, in-depth AI-generated notes: Avoma identifies the topic of discussion and breaks it down into smart categories, such as business needs, pain points, competitors, etc. with timestamps linked to the conversation, so you can jump to the specific parts of the conversation rather than listening to the entire recording.
- Highly accurate transcription: Count for upwards of 95% accuracy with Avoma. No words are misspelled or sentences left halfway despite industry-specific jargon, heavy accents, and background noise.
- Collaborative note editor: Multiple people can collaborate in real-time, drop comments, tag members, and mark action items. You also have the option to take private notes—visible only to you.
- Searchable knowledge base: A centralized dashboard allows you to organize meetings under different folders and quickly search for calls or transcripts.
- Auto-chapters & question identification: Get deeper context into each section of the meeting with auto-chapters that break down the conversation into bite-sized video clips. You can also hover over to the questions tab to look at specific questions asked by the participants.
- Snippets: Need to capture a specific portion of the meeting and share it on Slack with the team members? With Snippets, you can highlight text from a conversation and create a video snippet instantly to share on any channel you like.
- Speaker insights & keyword tracking: Avoma identifies and differentiates speakers and tracks their talk time, talk-to-listen ratio, longest monologues, filler words, etc. You can also set alerts for keywords and track them on a daily/weekly/monthly basis.
- Wide variety of integrations: You can integrate Avoma with several video conferencing apps, dialers, collaboration tools, and CRMs. (Check out the complete list).
Pros of Avoma:
- A forever free plan
- End-to-end meeting lifecycle assistant—agenda setting, meeting scheduling, automatic recording & transcription, and follow-up action items.
- Highly accurate transcript
- Advanced AI note-taking with ‘smart categories’
- Centralized dashboard to organize and manage meetings
- Available as a mobile app
Cons of Avoma:
- Not a basic AI transcriber
- Designed for organizations. Not ideal for individuals, students, teachers, researchers, etc
Pricing:
- Free plan available
- Starter: $19/user/month
- Plus: $49/user/month
- Business: $79/user/month
- Enterprise: $129/user/month
What users say about Avoma:
2. Otter
Otter is an AI meeting assistant for teams that can record both in-person and virtual meetings, transcribe calls into text, and summarize meeting notes. What’s unique about Otter is that it can transcribe imported audio and video files from YouTube, Dropbox, etc., and export them into various file formats.
Another thing Otter does differently is the Otter AI chat, which allows you to get up to speed on meetings by generating answers from discussions, meeting notes, and task lists in the workspace.
Pros of Otter:
- Generate live summaries, highlight takeaways, and tag teammates
- Create follow-up emails and blog posts from AI-generated summaries
- Create dedicated channels and add team members
- Speaker identification and basic keyword tracking
Cons of Otter:
- Low transcription accuracy
- Has no video support. It turns all the video recordings into audio files
- Expensive compared to other AI meeting assistants
Pricing:
- Free plan available
- Pro: $16.99/month per user
- Business: $30/month per user
- Enterprise: Contact for pricing
What users say about Otter:
3. Fireflies.ai
Fireflies.ai has been around in the meeting AI assistant for a while. It allows you to transcribe meetings, send recaps, upload audio, and share or download transcripts. With Fireflies, you can organize team meetings with dedicated channels and store them for future reference. You can also sort the meetings by date, project, team, or topic to easily search for conversations on the dashboard.
Pros of Fireflies.ai:
- AI-powered search for conversation snippets, keyword tracking, and more
- Tracks speaker talk time, key topics, sentiments, and monologues
- Creates magic soundbites to share a specific part of the conversation
- At any time, click on the chatbot AskFred to ask questions, key agenda, action items, and meeting overview
- Native integration with video conferencing apps, CRMs, and collaboration platforms.
Cons of Fireflies.ai:
- Doesn’t do a great job at summarizing meeting notes
- Transcriptions are more often not accurate
- Storage runs out quickly & the CS team is super aggressive in upselling premium plans
Pricing:
- Free plan available
- Pro: $18/month per user
- Business: $29/month per user
- Enterprise: $39/month per user
What users say about Fireflies:
3. tl;dv
(Source: tl;dv)
tl;dv is an AI notetaker that records and transcribes meetings from Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams. What I like about tl;dv is that you access a live transcript in the same window where the meeting is taking place. After the meeting is over, tl;dv generates a summary and relevant takeaways for each team member and ships it to them automatically.
Pros of tl;dv:
- Intelligent AI-powered search to surface meetings & transcripts
- Understands the topic of discussion and assigns meeting tags
- Highlight notes, tag members, and assign action items within the transcript
- Generate weekly/monthly meeting summaries that list action items, next steps, etc
Cons of tl;dv:
- Limited storage and features on the free plan
- Occasionally meeting summaries highlight irrelevant details
- Difficult to edit clips or soundbites
- Lacks browser support
Pricing:
- Free plan available
- Pro: $29/month per user
- Business: $98/month per user
- Enterprise: Custom pricing available
What users say about tl;dv:
5. Fathom
If you’re looking for a free AI notetaker with basic features, Fathom is a great option. It can record, transcribe, highlight, and summarize meetings, as well as sync meeting notes to popular CRMs such as Salesforce and Hubspot. It also has native integrations with multiple collaboration and productivity platforms.
Pros of Fathom:
- Automatically sync meeting summaries to CRM
- Create clips from specific parts of the meeting and share them on Slack
- Set up daily/weekly alerts for specific keywords (available on the paid version)
- Create playlists of the best moments to coach your team (available on the paid version)
Cons of Fathom:
- Basic AI transcriber with limited features (compared to the likes of Avoma, tl;dv, and Fireflies)
- Offers very new native integrations
- External users need to create a Fathom account to access calls & transcript
- Team collaboration features are available only for premium plan users
- Doesn’t record phone calls
Pricing:
- Free plan available
- Premium: $15/month per user
- Team Edition: $19/month per user
- Team Edition Pro: $29/month per user
What users say about Fathom:
What to look for in an AI Meeting Assistant?
Whether you need to generate transcripts, summarize notes, or extract key insights, these are the must-haves to look for in every AI meeting assistant:
- Integrations: You likely use other tools such as Google Calendar for scheduling meetings, ClickUp or Asana to manage tasks and collaborate with team members, and CRM to store customer data. Look for an AI meeting assistant that integrates with a wide variety of platforms to streamline your existing workflows and bring consistency to operations.
- Variety of AI features: Almost all AI meeting assistants can record and transcribe meetings. Look at the extra features they can offer you—AI-generated notes, sentiment analysis, topic breakdown, keyword tracking, and more. Of course, this will also depend on your use case and the capabilities you need.
- Pricing: Not all AI meeting assistants are created equally. Some are loaded with advanced features that you don't need, while others could be limiting. We suggest tools with either a freemium or a free plan so you can try them out before making a purchase.
- End-to-end automation: Very few AI meeting assistants offer features that automate the entire meeting experience—scheduling meetings, agenda setting, automatic recording and transcription, AI-generated notes, and CRM sync. In the long run, this helps you save time and improve team productivity.
- Collaboration features: Many platforms hide this behind a paywall, but you should be able to tag members, comment, and mark action items for seamless collaboration. At the same time, you should be able to store and organize meetings under different folders and search for calls/transcripts quickly.
Make meetings more efficient with AI Meeting Assistant
With so many tools in the market, it can’t be easy to choose the one that aligns with your business needs, size, and budget. We hope that we did justice in relaying what each tool does best, so you can go ahead and try it for yourself, and decide which one is the best for you.
Otter and Fireflies.ai are both great AI notetakers if you’re looking for simple transcription and note-taking. But at the same time, tl;dv and Avoma offer a better bang for your buck with advanced features available on the free plan.
But if you’re looking for an all-in-one AI meeting assistant to automate your complete meeting workflow—from scheduling meetings to automatic recording and transcription, AI-generated notes and summaries, and follow-ups—we recommend signing up for Avoma.
And while you’re at it, also look at what our 1200+ users have to say about us.
