Updated: May 23
Unlocking Meeting Efficiency: A Comparative Analysis of 5 Assistants’ Pros and Cons
Finding the Best AI Note Taker for Meetings
How We Evaluate and Test Apps
Our best app recommendations are written by users who have spent hours, testing, and writing about software. Unless stated otherwise, we spend dozens of hours researching and testing apps, using each one as intended and evaluating it against the criteria we set for that category. We are never paid for including any app or linking to any site – we value the trust our readers place in us to provide authentic evaluations of the apps we review.
The AI meeting assistants enhance platforms like Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams by offering new features to help you keep track of your meetings. You can use them to refresh your memory, accurately quote participants, or share important information with your entire team.
All the apps you’ll discover here have one common feature: they transcribe the audio from your meetings into text, making it easy to search through everything that was said. From there, each app offers its unique spin on how to best assist you: it can help you summarize the entire conversation, extract key insights, or provide analytics to improve productivity.
For our testing, we focused on small businesses using Google Meet with team discussions. We tested each app one by one under these conditions.
Here’s what we looked for while testing the AI meeting assistants:
Ease Implement: Evaluate how simple it is to connect the apps to your calendar and video conferencing software, with a minimum requirement of working with Zoom and Google Meet.
Language Support: Assessing the number of languages the app can handle for transcription and other features.
Automation and Productivity Boosters: Prioritizing apps that offer time-saving features like automatically joining meetings or enabling pre-meeting agenda sharing.
Collaboration: After a meeting, ease of organizing and searching information is crucial, along with seamless sharing capabilities to keep the entire team informed.
AI Features: Examining transcription quality and the value added by AI features such as summarization, insight extraction, and sentiment analysis.
Integration: Evaluating the breadth of integrations, especially for sending lead data to CRMs, action items to task managers, or meeting summaries to dedicated Slack channels.
Pricing: Checking if pricing plans are clear and highlighting any important aspects not covered in the pricing.
Pros: Identifying the well-executed functions and features that users may appreciate.
Cons: Pointing out disappointing features or aspects that users should not expect from the app.
Free Limits: Clarifying the limitations of the free version, so users know what to expect before trying it out.
Best For: Providing a one-sentence summary recommending the most suitable users for the app.
Otter: Unleash Productivity with Seamless SaaS Integration
Fireflies: Elevate Collaboration with Video-Powered Automation
Grain: AI-Driven Meeting Intelligence for CRM Powerhouses
Tactiq: Desktop Transcription Mastery for Google Meet Teams
meetXcc: Simple AI Note-Taking for Focused Google Meet Users
Best For
Boot Into Meeting
Free Plans
Real-time English transcription
Yes
Total 300 monthly transcription minutes (30 minutes per conversation)
Automatic meeting notes and video recording
Yes
800 mins of transcription
Integrating with popular CRM tools
Yes
20 meeting with basic AI notes
Desktop transcription for Google Meet
No
10 meeting and 5 AI credits per month
Unlimited automated note-taking
No
10 meeting with unlimited AI
Otter : Unleash Productivity with Seamless SaaS Integration
Otter seamlessly integrates with your workflow. Once authorized, it automatically adds OtterPilot to every meeting, supporting popular platforms like Google Meet, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams. With compatibility across the web, Android, iOS, and Chrome extensions, capturing meeting audio is a breeze, regardless of your device.
While Otter currently supports only English transcriptions.
Streamline your workflow by uploading media files directly to Otter for transcription, and support upload media(mp3, mp4…) to get transcripts. Here is a list of support formats.
Otter’s home feed centralizes all your meeting information, providing a birds-eye view of your schedule by connecting with Google or Microsoft calendars. Stay organized and never miss a beat.
https://otter.ai/blog/meet-the-new-otter
Live transcription of meetings via the Otter app
Speaker identification for clear attribution
Automated summaries to quickly grasp key points
Capture virtual meeting slides and embed them into notes
Otter boasts over 20 integration partners, enabling seamless data exchange across your tech stack, including:
Video conferencing: Google Meet, Teams, Zoom
CRMs: Salesforce, HubSpot
Storage: Google Drive, Amazon S3, Dropbox
Analytics: Snowflake
Calendars: Microsoft Outlook, Google Calendar
Mobile apps: iOS, Android
https://otter.ai/integrations/calendar
Otter offers a free plan with 300 monthly transcription minutes (30 minutes per conversation) alongside paid Pro ($9.17) and Business ($20) plans.
Check their website for the latest pricing details. Otter Pricing
For a comprehensive breakdown, read our Otter Pricing Explained After All.
If your team relies on multiple SaaS tools, Otter’s extensive integration features could streamline processes, enabling seamless data exchange, and boosting productivity and collaboration.
To use Otter during meetings, you must invite the OtterPilot bot. Additionally, transcriptions are currently limited to English.
300 monthly transcription minutes
30 minutes per conversation
Teams seeking to automate and optimize their business processes by integrating SaaS tools, enabling seamless data exchange, and improving overall productivity and collaboration.
Fireflies: Elevate Collaboration with Video-Powered Automation
While Fireflies does require inviting their bot to your meeting platform initially, you can also upload pre-recorded audio or video files to generate transcripts and summaries effortlessly.
Support 69+ languages.
Automated transcription, summarization, and search capabilities
Meeting video capture (Business tier)
Create shareable “Soundbites” – audio snippets for social media
Analyze voice conversations, tracking speaker talk time
Share meeting notes directly to Slack, Notion, and Asana
Collaborate with your team by adding comments within Fireflies
Easy sharing of meetings with audio-synced transcripts
Below is the example sharing link. You could hear the voice with the transcript.
https://app.fireflies.ai/view/Fireflies-AI-Platform-Quick-Overview::b1H42tdxM8
AskFred: Ask questions about your meetings (requires AI Credits purchase)
AI Summaries do not consume AI Credits
AI Credits access for Pro, Business, and Enterprise tiers
Learn more about AI Credits: https://guide.fireflies.ai/hc/en-us/articles/12975423895313-Learn-about-AI-Credits
How are AI Credits priced?
The AI Credits pack gives you credits that renew at the start of each monthly cycle.
Credits/mo
Price (Billed Monthly)
50
$5
120
$12
200
$20
500
$48
1000
$90
1600
$136
2000
$170
3000
$240
5000
$375
10,000
$600
Fireflies boasts 46 integration partners, including:
Video conferencing: Google Meet, Teams, Zoom, Webex
CRMs: Salesforce, HubSpot, Zendesk Sell
Storage: Dropbox, Box
Analytics: Snowflake
Calendars: Microsoft Outlook, Google Calendar
Mobile apps: iOS, Android
Free plan available
Pro: $10/month
Business: $19/month
AI Credit required for AskFred feature (separate purchase)
Check the website for the latest pricing here.
Feature-rich and user-friendly interface
Integrates with a wide range of tools
No real-time transcript viewing
Need to add one bot in your meeting
AskFred AI requires additional AI Credits to purchase
Cannot download meeting transcripts
No access to AskFred AI
Teams seeking to automate processes through SaaS integrations and leverage video recording capabilities to streamline collaboration.
Grain: AI-Driven Meeting Intelligence for CRM Powerhouses
While Grain recommends the “Auto-record customer meetings” setup option; initial integration with Google Meet may require manually inviting the Grain bot to join meetings and capture transcripts.
Grain currently supports language transcription in Bulgarian, Croatian, Catalan, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish. However, only English will have the functionality of live transcription.
https://support.grain.com/en/articles/4742859-does-grain-support-other-languages
Video Recording & Sharing: Automatically record meetings for easy sharing or embedding video clips.
Recommended for capturing important discussions.
Control who can access your recordings by sharing meeting links or email invitations, ensuring seamless collaboration within your team.
AI Meeting Notes: Automatic note-taking with highlighted key points for easy review.
Meeting Recaps: Receive email summaries with AI notes and the next steps after each session.
Customize AI Prompts: Tailor the AI’s focus to your specific needs.
Streamline your workflow by integrating Grain with popular CRM tools like HubSpot, Salesforce, and Zapier (Recommended).
Free: 20 meeting credits, basic AI features
Starter ($15): Unlimited meetings, limited integrations
Business ($29): Unlimited meetings, full integration support
Video recording with automated key point detection
Robust CRM integration options
The free plan has limited AI and integration features
Fewer language options compared to some alternatives
Need to add one bot to join your meeting
20 meeting credits
Access to AI Meeting Notes
Video recording capabilities
Larger English-speaking organizations utilize CRM tools that require comprehensive meeting capture and AI-assisted note-taking capabilities.
Tactiq: Desktop Transcription Mastery for Google Meet Teams
Seamlessly generate transcripts by simply installing a lightweight extension – no need for bots or additional apps. However, note that Tactiq currently supports desktop browsers only, with no mobile or tablet compatibility.
Leveraging the speech-to-text capabilities of platforms like Google Meet, Zoom, and Teams, Tactiq offers accurate transcriptions across over 30+ languages, ensuring your global meetings are covered.
Experience a distraction-free meeting environment with Tactiq’’s bot-free Chrome extension, allowing you to focus on the discussion at hand.
The export function may not work for some languages. Chinese will get garbled characters.
Easily share meeting transcripts with your team, fostering seamless collaboration and information sharing.
Generate insightful meeting notes and summaries with custom prompts
Access to AI features requires credit consumption based on your plan
Streamline your workflow by integrating Tactiq with popular tools like:
CRMs: HubSpot, Salesforce
Productivity: Notion, Google Calendar
Free: 10 meeting transcripts and 5 AI credits per month
Pro ($8): Unlimited transcripts and 10 AI credits
Team ($16.7): Unlimited transcripts and AI credits
Check the website for the latest pricing details Tactiq Pricing.
You could check more Budget-Friendly Brilliance: Tactiq Pricing Solutions for Maximum Value!
Bot-free experience for a distraction-free meeting
Affordable pricing with essential features included
Limited to desktop browser usage, no mobile support
Potentially higher cost compared to some alternatives meetXcc
10 meeting transcripts
5 AI credits per month
Small teams and businesses that primarily use Google Meet, but require a desktop-based solution due to the lack of mobile support.
meetXcc: Simple AI Note-Taking for Focused Google Meet Users
MeetXcc offers a seamless experience by simply installing a lightweight extension – no need for additional bots or apps. Currently, it supports desktop browsers only with no mobile or tablet compatibility. Its integration is limited to Google Meet for now, with no support for Zoom or Microsoft Teams yet.
Leveraging the speech-to-text capabilities of Google Meet, meetXcc offers accurate transcriptions across over 80+ languages.
Experience distraction-free meetings with meetXcc’s bot-free Chrome extension, allowing you to stay focused on the discussion.
Option to use your own GPT key for enhanced security and privacy.
Download transcripts and notes for offline access and archiving.
Share meeting notes and transcripts instantly with a single click, generating a shareable link. However, collaborative editing or commenting is not currently supported – shared notes are view-only for other members.
You can check the example here. https://www.meetxcc.app/shared/ZKfwvVmY
Offers unlimited meeting note generation for paid members, with the ability to regenerate notes until satisfied.
Generates a mindmap for a visual overview, helping you quickly grasp key points.
Real-time meeting summarization as discussions progress, or customized prompts for translation, sales assistance, and more.
Currently, meetXcc integrates solely with Slack, with no other CRM tool integrations available yet.
Paid plan: $8 per month, the most affordable option compared to other AI meeting tools.
Only offers a free and paid plan currently.
No meeting bot is required, and unlimited meeting notes and AI features for a paid plan.
AI-generated mind maps provide a visual summary of meetings.
A most affordable option among AI meeting assistants.
Limited to Google Meet integration only.
Requires Chrome extension installation, restricting usage to desktop browsers.
All features are accessible but limited to a lifetime of 10 meetings on the free plan.
meetXcc is ideal for individuals or small teams focused primarily on meeting note-taking, who use Google Meet and don’t require extensive integrations beyond Slack.
Conclusion
We aim to take you on a journey through the offerings of five pioneering companies: Otter, Fireflies, Grain, Tactiq, and meetXcc.
Otter, the seamless SaaS integrator, unlocks productivity by seamlessly interweaving your tech stack, enabling data to flow freely across tools. Fireflies, on the other hand, elevates collaboration with its video-powered automation, capturing every nuance of your meetings.
For organizations deeply rooted in CRM ecosystems, Grain stands tall as the AI-driven meeting intelligence powerhouse, meticulously capturing and dissecting every conversation.
Tactiq and meetXcc cater to the needs of agile, Google Meet-centric teams, offering desktop transcription mastery and simple, AI-powered note-taking respectively, each with its own unique flair.
We aim to help you find the ideal AI meeting assistant that will complement your workflow and boost your team’s productivity to new levels.