A colleague at my work recorded a meeting and produced the minutes with actions almost the moment the meeting ended. How on earth did she do that?
Posted 30 April 2026
It looks like magic the first time you see it. It is not. She almost certainly had an AI note-taker sitting inside the meeting, listening alongside everyone else.
How I'd approach it
The category of tool is called a meeting transcription assistant. The two best known are Otter and Fireflies. You give the tool permission to join your Zoom, Teams, or Google Meet calls, and it appears in the participant list as a bot. While the meeting is running it transcribes everything in real time, identifies speakers, and at the end produces a written summary plus a list of action items pulled out of the conversation. The "almost the moment the meeting ended" bit is real. By the time you have closed the laptop, the summary is in your inbox.
If you want to try it yourself, start with Otter. There is a free tier that gives you 300 minutes of transcription a month, which is enough for a typical week of meetings if you are not in calls all day. You sign up, connect it to your calendar, and tell it which meetings to join. Fireflies is very similar and worth a look if your organisation already uses it for sales or customer calls.
If you work in a Microsoft 365 organisation that has paid for the Copilot add-on, the same trick is built into Teams. After a Teams meeting, Copilot can produce a recap, key points, and follow-ups without you doing anything except clicking the recap button. The advantage of the Microsoft route is that the recording and transcript stay inside your organisation's tenant, which is what most workplace IT and privacy teams will prefer.
Two things worth knowing before you start.
The summary is a draft, not the truth. The transcript will get names slightly wrong, especially Australian names and acronyms. The action item list will sometimes invent an action that nobody actually agreed to, or miss one that was genuinely committed. Read the output, edit it, and only then send it on. Treat it as a sharp first cut, not a verbatim record.
You have to tell the other people in the meeting. In Australia, recording a conversation without informing the other participants is regulated by state-level surveillance and listening device laws, and the rules differ from state to state. The simple, safe rule is to say at the start of the call that the meeting is being recorded and transcribed by an AI assistant, and to give people a chance to object. Most meeting transcription tools also display a banner saying the bot has joined, but that is not a substitute for a clear verbal heads-up.
What I'd avoid
Do not use a free consumer transcription tool for any meeting that contains commercially sensitive, legally privileged, or personal information about a third party. Free tiers often retain audio and transcripts on the provider's servers, and the privacy default is usually weaker than a workplace tenant. For sensitive conversations, use the Microsoft or Google enterprise tooling your employer already pays for, or do not record at all.
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