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How an AI note-taker helps you save time and stay focused

Learn the benefits of using AI to transcribe meetings and summarize information, so you can automate note-taking with AI Companion.

8 min read

Published on March 13, 2025

Smiling woman sitting at a laptop in an office.

In this blog

01 How AI note-takers work - Jumplink to How AI note-takers work
02 Why use an AI note-taker in your meeting? - Jumplink to Why use an AI note-taker in your meeting?
03 AI note-taker features to look for - Jumplink to AI note-taker features to look for
04 Using AI Companion, My Notes, and meeting summaries for personal note-taking - Jumplink to Using AI Companion, My Notes, and meeting summaries for personal note-taking
05 Get started with AI meeting summaries for Zoom - Jumplink to Get started with AI meeting summaries for Zoom

Robin Bunevich

Product Marketing Manager, Zoom AI

Robin Bunevich is a Product Marketing Manager at Zoom. She oversees product marketing and strategy for Zoom AI. After three years of leading marketing for Zoom’s Event Solution products, and launching one of the fastest growing products at Zoom, Zoom Events, she is now focused on helping organizations seamlessly adopt AI into their workflows. Prior to Zoom, she ran marketing for live events at The New York Times, and was instrumental in helping the organization transition to a fully virtual events program in March of 2020. At Zoom, Robin uses her 15 plus years of marketing and advertising experience to drive awareness and adoption for Zoom’s AI solutions.

If you’ve ever been assigned to take notes in a meeting, you know the struggles. You’re trying to write down what every person said accurately, but if your attention shifts for just a moment, you might miss an important detail. It’s harder to participate in the discussion fully if you’re occupied with listening and typing. Then after your meeting, you need to clean up your notes, capture crucial next steps, and send your summary to the rest of the team. All these tasks eat away at your ability to be productive and can stop collaboration in its tracks. But help is at hand: an AI note-taker is just the tool you need.

Many people are turning to AI meeting apps and tools to automate note-taking and summarize meeting information. It’s like having an AI assistant by your side during meetings, taking notes, and keeping track of discussion items so you can focus on the conversation. Not to mention, having a meeting summary with key points to refer back to makes writing that follow-up email much easier.

See how you can benefit from an AI note-taking tool — and why it just might become your new best friend in meetings.

Generative AI models are perhaps best known for generating messages based on a prompt, but they’re also great at summarizing information. They use natural language processing (NLP) to synthesize longer messages into short summaries that include key points about the text.

An AI note-taker transcribes a meeting conversation and uses the transcript as the text input to generate a meeting summary of what was discussed. Many note-taking apps also identify key points and action items based on the context of the call.

Some AI note-taking apps require a full meeting recording to generate a meeting summary. If you don’t want your meeting recorded, look for a tool that doesn’t require it — for instance, Zoom AI Companion can generate a meeting summary without recording the meeting.

Taking notes during meetings, and sharing notes and action items with colleagues afterward, can take up a fair amount of time at work. According to a 2023 survey conducted by Morning Consult,* nearly 75% of team leaders said they perform these tasks at least a few times a week, and 48% of leaders surveyed said they spend more time than they want taking notes.

An AI note-taker can help you save time, but there’s more to it than that. Here are a few advantages of using an AI note-taking app:

No more need to multitask in your meeting

When you’re taking notes in certain meetings, you can be focused more on the task at hand, not on what you can contribute to the discussion. Let your AI note-taker do the work, and you can be a full participant in the meeting.

No more missed details

Have you ever had to step away from a meeting for a second, only to miss an important detail? An AI note-taker doesn’t need to take breaks, so you can rest assured that your meeting summaries will be comprehensive. Plus, some tools allow you to ask your note-taking app questions about the meeting in real time, so you don’t have to interrupt the discussion to ask, “Can you repeat that?”

More efficient use of time

It takes time to clean up and organize your notes after every call before you can share them with others. AI-powered meeting summaries are often ready to review and share as soon as they’re generated, so you can get those insights to your team faster. Some tools can automate this process by sending the summary directly to attendees via a follow-up email or chat as soon as the meeting ends.

Catch up on missed meetings

If you have a packed schedule and are double-booked, don’t worry. Instead of asking colleagues for an update (and relying on their notes, which might be incomplete), some products can join meetings on your behalf—depending on the meeting platform—and generate a meeting summary to help you catch up on what you missed.

Zoom AI Companion is available at no additional cost with eligible paid plans.** Upgrade today to get access to meeting summaries and other AI features.

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The best AI note-takers enable you to be more productive with your time by offloading some of the tasks in your workday. In addition to note-taking and meeting summaries, they might also help you find the information you need by responding to questions about the meeting, capturing and sharing next steps so you can follow up with your meeting participants more quickly, and formatting your notes based on helpful project templates.

Not all AI note-taking apps have these capabilities. When evaluating solutions, here are some important features to look for.

High-quality, real-time transcription and summarization

This is the cornerstone of any AI meeting note-taker: technology that canthe ability to accurately transcribe a conversation in real time and generate a summary from the text. Some note-taking tools even allow you to ask questions like, “Was my name mentioned?” or “Can you tell me what happened so far?” and get a response based on the transcript. When evaluating AI meeting summary providers, read reports and reviews that address the accuracy and reliability of the transcripts and summaries.

Compatible with your meeting platform of choice

Whether you use Zoom Meetings, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams, your AI note-taking app should be able to transcribe the meeting audio directly from your device. Using a consistent AI note-taking app across multiple platforms is a great option because your meeting data can be saved in one place.

Easy controls

Sometimes sensitive topics will come up during a meeting that you didn’t anticipate would be discussed. Having the ability to turn off your AI note-taker gives you control over what information gets included or excluded from the post-meeting takeaways. Look for a tool that has an easy off switch you can access quickly if needed.

Action items and next steps

An AI note-taker should go beyond summarizing the meeting conversation — look for one that identifies next steps and assigns action items to team members based on the discussion.

Easy options for sharing summaries post-meeting

Look for a tool that allows you to automatically share AI summaries via email or chat for easy follow-ups. You should also be able to choose who receives the summary automatically. Some solutions, like Zoom AI Companion, make it easy to create a document and automatically populate it with action items from the meeting summary, so you can get started right away.

Multilingual summaries

If you have a global team and customer base, different languages might be spoken in meetings throughout the day. Find a solution that can support multiple languages — it’s especially helpful if it can automatically recognize the language being spoken and provide the AI summary in that language.

Cost-effective pricing

Many platforms, such as Microsoft 365 Copilot, offer AI capabilities as an added cost per user. Zoom AI Companion capabilities, including meeting summaries, next steps, and real-time meeting queries, are included at no additional cost with eligible paid Zoom plans.**

While AI Companion has delivered reliable, accurate AI meeting summaries, note-taking with AI Companion is about to get even better with My Notes, giving users the ability to bring a personal note-taker to third-party, Zoom, and in-person meetings. Whether you’re at your desk or on the go, My Notes works across devices so you never miss a detail.

With My Notes, you'll be able to take your own notes alongside your meeting, and AI Companion can enhance them with the meeting transcript for a more complete context of your meeting.

If you have an eligible paid Zoom plan, you already have access to AI Companion (if you don’t have an eligible plan, you can upgrade today). You may need to ask your Zoom administrator to turn on some features.

Think of how you can implement note-taking with AI Companion before, during, and after your meetings:

Take notes on the go with My Notes on mobile

My Notes on mobile extends the power of AI note-taking beyond the desktop, so you can capture and act on conversations where you work.

Capture anywhere: Use the Zoom app on your phone to transcribe and take notes in Zoom meetings or in-person conversations—no laptop required.
Act in the moment: The live transcript lets you follow conversations in real time and mark key points as they happen, improving focus and recall.
Stay connected across devices: Notes and transcripts sync seamlessly to the Zoom desktop app, so you can start on mobile and finish editing or sharing later without losing context.

Make the most of your time after a meeting

After your meeting ends, AI Companion helps you turn notes into actionable insights and organized work.

Detailed summaries without recording: My Notes generates summaries directly from the transcript, organized based on the topic you care about most.
No recording required: Keep conversations private while capturing what was discussed and who said what.

Important features to help you get to work faster

Create a Zoom Doc from your meeting summary to help organize discussion points, action items, and next steps. Pre-built meeting templates help you format based on meeting type — project updates, brainstorming sessions, or team check-ins.
Use Personal Workflows to automate everyday tasks like scheduling follow-ups or sharing updates across Zoom Workplace, with ready-to-use templates that help streamline repetitive processes.
Spot your next steps and priorities easily from your meeting summaries. With summaries, docs, chat, and tasks all connected across Zoom Workplace, you can find what you need and take action right away.

Turn notes into action with Workflows in My Notes

Why stop at a summary when your notes can do the follow-up for you? With built-in Workflows in My Notes, you can automatically trigger post-meeting tasks—like sending recap emails, updating your CRM**, or creating to-dos—directly from your meeting notes while the details are still fresh.

Turn notes into action: Attach workflows to your meeting notes to automatically trigger follow-up tasks—like sending recap emails, updating your CRM, or creating to-dos—directly from My Notes.
Available to all participants with My Notes enabled: Because workflows are integrated with My Notes rather than the meeting itself, any host or participant who has My Notes can attach and run workflows on their own notes.
Flexible and extensible: Attach multiple workflows — up to five per meeting’s notes — to automate follow‑ups and next steps.
Seamless entry points: Access workflows when scheduling a new meeting (“Attach Workflow”) or from within your My Notes document after the meeting—making it easy to automate follow-ups at the moment that matters most.

Ready to get AI-powered note-taking assistance in your meetings — plus other productivity tools to help you throughout your workday?

Check out our getting started guide for everything you need to know about making the most of AI Companion, and visit our support page to learn how to enable meeting summaries.

Editor’s note: This blog was originally published in November 2023 and was updated in February 2026 to include the latest product information.

*Based on an online survey of 11,023 full-time knowledge workers in the U.S., U.K., Ireland, Germany, France, Japan, Singapore, and Australia. Conducted by Morning Consult on behalf of Zoom Video Communications, Inc., between August 10–25, 2023.

**Zoom AI Companion features may not be available for all regions or industry verticals. Included at no additional cost with the paid services in your Zoom user account. Additional services may be available for a fee.