How to Use AI to Transcribe a Meeting (And Actually Do Something With the Notes)

The short answer: Use a tool like Otter.ai or Fireflies — they join your calls automatically, record and transcribe everything, and produce a summary with action items. You show up to the meeting and the notes write themselves.

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There’s a particular kind of meeting hell: you’re trying to follow the conversation, make good points at the right moment, and scribble down everything important at the same time. You end up doing all three badly. Your notes are half-finished. The action items you agreed to are a blur. You spent an hour in a meeting and came out with a page of chaotic bullet points that mean nothing by Thursday.

AI fixes this — not by making meetings shorter (we’re not miracle workers), but by taking the note-taking off your plate entirely. You can actually be present. The transcript and summary look after themselves.

The two main approaches

1. An AI meeting assistant (best for most people)

These are dedicated tools that join your video calls — Zoom, Teams, Google Meet — as a bot participant, record everything, transcribe it in real-time, and send you a summary afterwards.

Otter.ai is the most widely used. Free tier allows a certain number of meeting minutes per month. It connects to your calendar, knows when you have a meeting, and joins automatically. After the call, you get a searchable transcript and an AI summary.

Fireflies.ai does the same thing with a slightly different interface. Its free tier is generous, and it integrates well with CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot if that matters to your workflow.

Microsoft Copilot in Teams — if your organisation uses Microsoft 365, Copilot can recap meetings and catch you up on conversations you missed. Worth checking if it’s available on your plan. (More on Copilot at what is Microsoft Copilot.)

2. Transcribe a recording with AI (best for one-off use)

If you have a recorded meeting, interview, or voice note and just need a transcript, you can upload audio directly to several tools:

• Otter.ai accepts file uploads even on the free plan
• Whisper is OpenAI’s transcription model — highly accurate, available through various apps
• Many video platforms (Zoom, Teams) have built-in transcription that you can turn on before a meeting

Once you have a transcript — however you got it — paste it into Claude or ChatGPT and ask:

“Here’s the transcript from a meeting. Please summarise the key discussion points, decisions made, and action items with owners.”

You’ll get a clean, structured summary in about ten seconds.

Setting up Otter.ai (the easiest starting point)

1. Go to otter.ai and create a free account
2. Connect your Google or Microsoft calendar
3. Otter will see your upcoming meetings and ask if you want it to join automatically
4. Next time you’re on a Zoom or Google Meet call, Otter joins, records, and transcribes
5. After the call, check your Otter inbox for the transcript and summary

That’s the whole setup. After the first time, it’s completely automatic.

What to do with the transcript

A raw transcript is useful, but what you really want is the summary. Once you have either the AI-generated summary or a transcript you’ve pasted into Claude, you can do more with it:

Extract action items:

“From this meeting transcript, list every action item, who it’s assigned to, and any deadline mentioned.”

Draft a follow-up email:

“Using this meeting summary, write a follow-up email to the team covering the key decisions and next steps.”

Catch someone up:

“Write a three-paragraph summary of this meeting for someone who couldn’t attend.”

Identify what needs a decision:

“What topics came up in this meeting that still need a decision or more discussion?”

A note on consent and privacy

A few things worth knowing before you start recording every meeting:

Always tell people. Most jurisdictions require consent to record. Say it at the start: “Just a heads up, I’m using a transcription tool today so I don’t have to take notes — is everyone okay with that?” In practice, most people are fine with it.

Check your company policy. Some organisations have rules about third-party tools recording internal calls. Worth a quick check.

Sensitive conversations. AI transcription tools send audio to cloud servers for processing. For anything genuinely confidential, be aware of that.

More AI at work

If you found this useful, how to use AI at work covers the broader picture — from emails to reports to making your working day more efficient. And how to use AI to write emails faster is worth reading if email is taking up too much of your day.

Frequently asked questions

Can AI transcribe a meeting automatically? Yes. Tools like Otter.ai, Fireflies, and Microsoft Copilot can join your calls, record them, transcribe everything that’s said, and produce a summary with action items — all automatically.

Is AI meeting transcription accurate? For clear audio with one or two speakers, accuracy is very high — around 90-95%. It drops with heavy accents, technical jargon, or poor audio quality. Names and company-specific terms sometimes need correcting.

Can I use AI to transcribe a meeting I’ve already recorded? Yes. Most AI transcription tools accept uploaded audio and video files. You can also paste a transcript into ChatGPT or Claude and ask it to summarise the key points and action items.

Do I need to tell people if I’m recording a meeting? Yes, in most places this is a legal requirement. Always inform participants at the start of the call that it’s being recorded. Most AI meeting tools display a notification automatically when they join a call.