An app that takes notes for you in meetings, explained

What does this kind of app actually do?

Strip away the branding and every app in this category does roughly the same four things:

• It listens. Either a bot joins your call and records the audio (often the video too), or software on your own computer picks up the sound being played and your microphone.
• It turns speech into text. This is the same underlying technology as dictation, applied to a conversation between several people instead of one person talking.
• It figures out who said what. Most apps try to separate the transcript by speaker, so the notes read like a conversation rather than one unbroken block of text.
• It writes a summary. Once the meeting ends, the app condenses the transcript into something shorter, usually a paragraph of context plus a list of decisions and action items, sometimes with the person each task belongs to.

Some also let you ask questions afterward, like "what did we agree on the budget," and get an answer pulled from the transcript instead of having to scroll back through it.

The bot vs no-bot difference

This is the biggest practical difference between apps in this category, and it's worth understanding before you pick one.

A meeting bot is a small automated participant that joins your video call the same way a person would. It shows up in the participant list, often with a name like "Jane's Notetaker," and everyone on the call can see it's there. It stays for the whole meeting, records audio and usually video, and sends that recording to the company's servers to be processed. This is how most well-known meeting note apps work.

A no-bot app runs entirely on your own computer instead. It picks up the sound your computer is already playing during the call, the other person's voice coming through your speakers, along with your own microphone, the same way a person in the room with you would hear both sides of the conversation. Nothing joins the call as a visible attendee, and nobody else needs to install anything or approve anything for it to work.

Each approach trades something for something else. A bot can join a call from any device and capture video, which is useful if you want a recording you can watch back later, but it needs to be let into the call, some meeting hosts block unfamiliar bots, and everyone present can see an automated participant is recording them. A no-bot app only captures what happens on the one computer it's running on, so it can't record a call you join by phone or from a different device, but it never shows up as a visible presence and there's no separate video file being stored anywhere.

What do these apps cost?

Pricing follows a similar shape across most of the category, checked September 2026. Otter's free plan covers 300 minutes a month, with paid plans starting around $8.33 a month per person when billed yearly. Fireflies offers a free tier and prices its paid plans from $18 to $29 a month per person. Fathom has one of the more generous free tiers, with unlimited recordings and a handful of AI summaries included, and its team plan starts around $19 a month per person.

Put together, expect a free tier that's real but capped, either by total minutes, number of meetings, or which features you can use, and paid plans somewhere between $8 and $30 a month for one person, often cheaper per month if you pay for the year upfront. Team and business tiers cost more and usually add things like shared meeting libraries or admin controls.

What happens to the recording?

This is the part people ask about least and should probably ask about most.

With a bot-based app, the audio and often the video get uploaded to the company's servers and stored there, sometimes indefinitely, so you or your team can play it back later. On a team plan, an administrator can usually see recordings made by any team member. Some companies use recordings to improve their own AI models unless you turn that off in settings, so it's worth checking that specifically if a call is sensitive.

With apps that don't use a bot, what happens depends entirely on the app, since there's no industry-wide standard here either. Some still upload and store the audio; others process it and discard it right away, keeping only the resulting text. The only way to know for sure is to check, and a straightforward app should be able to tell you in one plain sentence.

Before trusting any of these apps with a client call, a hiring conversation, or anything else sensitive, it's worth asking directly: is the recording saved, for how long, who besides me can access it, and is it used for anything beyond writing my notes?

A short checklist for picking one

1. Does a bot need to join your calls? If your meetings include people outside your company, or a client who'd be uncomfortable seeing an automated recorder join, that alone may rule out bot-based apps.
2. What happens to the recording, specifically? Get the actual answer, stored or discarded, for how long, and who can see it, rather than the marketing page's summary.
3. Does it work with the video app you actually use? Confirm Zoom, Meet, Teams, or whatever else your calls run on before you commit to a paid plan.
4. What's free, and is that enough to actually try it? A cap of two or three meetings tells you almost nothing; a couple of weeks of real use tells you a lot.

If you'd rather not have a bot join your calls

Amlin is a no-bot app for Mac. It listens to a meeting the way described above, by picking up the sound your computer is already playing along with your own microphone, and nothing joins the call as a visible participant. When the meeting ends, it turns the conversation into a structured summary: decisions, action items with owners, ready in seconds, and it keeps one running list of action items across every meeting instead of one per note. The meeting audio itself is never stored; it's used to write the note and then discarded, so there's no separate recording sitting on a server anywhere.

Amlin also includes system-wide dictation on the same custom dictionary as your meeting notes, so names and jargon it learns in one show up correctly in the other, and Ask, which answers questions about a meeting or your whole history with a citation back to the exact line it came from. It runs on macOS 13 or later on Apple silicon, with a free plan covering 4 meeting-hours a month and full note history, and Pro at $10 a month or $108 a year.