Top 3 AI Note Takers and Why You Need to be Using One

Episode #137: Top 3 AI Note Takers and Why You Need to Be Using One

Let’s be real... trying to take detailed notes during meetings and stay present is nearly impossible. That’s where AI comes in.

In this episode of Tech Savvy 101: AI & Automation Made Simple, I’m diving into the top 3 AI-powered note-taking tools that are saving entrepreneurs hours every single week. Whether you’re managing team meetings, client calls, or podcast interviews, these tools do the heavy lifting—so you can focus on the conversation without losing any details.

You’ll walk away knowing exactly which tools to try, how to use them, and how to avoid the most common mistakes people make when implementing AI note-takers into their workflow.

If you’re still manually typing out meeting notes—or worse, forgetting important details—this episode will completely change the way you work.

IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL LEARN:

➔ Why AI note-takers are essential for busy entrepreneurs
➔ The pros, cons, and best use cases for Fireflies AI, Otter AI, and Fathom
➔ How to use AI note-takers to improve productivity, documentation, and team communication
➔ Real talk on privacy, permissions, and best practices
➔ How to choose the right tool for your business needs

RESOURCES MENTIONED:

Affiliate Disclosure: Some of the links below may be affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission if you purchase through them—at no extra cost to you. I only recommend tools I personally use and love!

📌 Fireflies AI 
📌 Otter AI
📌 Fathom 

⏱️ TIMESTAMPS:

02:26 – The Importance of AI Note Taking
03:32 – Overview of Top AI Note Taking Tools
04:20 – Fireflies AI: The Business Powerhouse
07:04 – Otter AI: The Collaborative Note Taker
10:53 – Fathom: Unlimited Recordings for Free
13:21 – Advanced Strategies for AI Note Taking
26:03 – Common Mistakes and Best Practices
28:32 – Conclusion and Final Thoughts

LET'S CONNECT

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🖥️ Website
💻 Facebook Group

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Transcript

Sarah Baker 0:50

Hey there. Welcome back to Tech Savvy 101: AI Automation Made Simple. I'm your host, Sarah Baker, your tech savvy bestie, who's here to help you simplify your business, embrace automation, and save hours every week. Today, I am super excited to dive into a topic that is going to completely transform how you handle meetings, calls, and any kind of recorded conversation. We're talking about AI note taking tools, and trust me, this isn't just about having fancy transcripts sitting in a folder somewhere on your desktop collecting digital dust. If you've ever sat through a meeting frantically, scribbling notes while trying to actually participate in the conversation, or if you've ever walked away from an important call, wondering if you actually caught all of the key details, this episode is going to be an absolute game changer for how you run your business. I'm gonna walk you through 3 of the top AI notetaking tools on the market, Fireflies AI, Otter AI and Fathom. But more importantly, I'm also gonna show you how to turn these simple transcripts into absolute powerhouse business and educational assets that most people never even think about. By the end of this episode, you'll not only know which tools fit your needs and your budget, but you'll have a complete playbook for leveraging AI transcripts in ways that can literally transform how you work, learn, and grow your business. Let's dive in. Let's start with a little reality check. Studies suggest that most people's attentions start to wane after just 10 to 18 minutes in meetings. Now that's not because we're lazy. Our brains are just wired that way. So when you're juggling listening with participating and trying to take comprehensive notes, something's gotta give. And that's where AI note taking comes in. Think of using an AI note taker as having a personal meeting assistant that never gets tired or misses a word and can even tell you the key takeaways without you having to dig through pages and pages of notes. And here's what most people don't realize, these tools aren't just about convenience, they're about transformation. Because when you stop worrying about capturing every little detail, you can actually be more present in your conversations. You can ask better questions, you can build stronger relationships, and you can focus on what really matters. So in this episode, today, I am breaking down three of the best AI note taking tools on the market. Fireflies ai, Otter ai, and Fathom. I'm gonna go over their features, their pricing, and their ideal use cases. But more importantly, I'm gonna show you how to turn these simple transcripts into really powerful business and educational assets that can actually transform how you work and learn, and make you a more powerful listener. And make you better at your job. So by the end of this episode, you're not only gonna know which tool best fits your individual needs and budget, but you're also gonna have a complete playbook for leveraging how to use AI transcripts in ways that most people would never even consider. First, let's talk about Fireflies AI. I think of this as really a business powerhouse. Fireflies is like having a super smart intern in every meeting that you attend, or even some that you don't. It automatically is gonna join all of your video calls. It's gonna transcribe everything in real time, and then it's gonna give you a summary that actually makes sense and gives you the most important action items. But here's what really is gonna set it apart, and that's the integrations. You can connect Fireflies to your project management tools like we've talked about recently, Asana, Monday Notion. You can also connect it to your CRM, like HubSpot or Salesforce or even your Slack workspace. So when your meeting ends, and if there are action items that come out of that meeting, they can automatically flow right into your task management system. It's not just taking notes in that meeting, it's also turning those notes into actionable workflows. And then it also has an AI analysis feature that is really impressive. Fireflies can identify sentiment. It can track speaker talk time ratios, and it can even extract action items automatically. So say you're in sales, it can analyze even your pitch effectiveness and highlight moments where prospects on a sales call showed a buying signal. The pricing, I would say is pretty generous as well. They have a free plan that gives you unlimited transcriptions. Yes, unlimited plus 800 minutes of storage, allowing you to really hold onto the most important calls that you want to be able to refer back to. Most small teams can get by on this free plan for months, and when you do upgrade, the paid plans start around$10 per month per user. The paid plan is gonna add in features like advanced search, more integrations with additional tools, conversation intelligence and custom vocabulary training. One thing I particularly love is the search functionality because you can literally search across all of your meeting transcripts for specific keywords or topics or even phrases. Overall, I think Fireflies is best for businesses and sales teams that need really serious integration capabilities and who want their meeting notes to connect with their existing workflows. It's also really excellent for teams who want that additional detailed conversation analytics feature. Next up is Otter AI. This one is really popular. This is what I use personally, so I can speak from experience on Otter. It has millions of users and it's probably a note taker that you have seen on calls before. If there's a reason it's so popular and it's because it's really user friendly and offers real time transcription, that's very accurate. What I love about Otter is that it's very collaborative. Multiple people can highlight important parts during the meeting, add comments, and even assign action items to specific team members. Think of it kind of like Google Docs, but for meeting transcripts, you can also create shared folders for different projects or departments. I like this because I record a lot of meetings, so I can sort my recordings into folders, which allows me to find them even faster and keep similar recordings or recordings about similar topics together for even easier access. Otter really excels in educational settings as well. It allows students to record lectures, and it also automatically captures slide recordings, which is really amazing. So if you're on a Zoom call that has a really great presentation. When you go back to listen to the recording, you can see the slides in real time, which is really, really nice. It captures the slide changes and screenshots automatically and syncs them with the transcript. The AI summary feature, which is only on the paid plan, but it is really good because it creates like structured summaries with key topics and action items and important quotes, and it also has a really great mobile app, which makes it really easy to record and access transcripts on the go. The downside here is that the free plan is a little bit less than on Fireflies. You get 300 minutes per month and it caps individual conversations at 30 minutes on the free plan. For some users, that's more than sufficient, but if you have, say, back to back hour long meetings, then you're gonna cap out on the free plan quite quickly. The paid plan starts as low as$8.33 per month. And bumps you up to about 1200 minutes monthly, and that gets you additional features like AI generated summaries, advanced search and priority support, and then they go up to another tier of the business plan level, which is$20 per month, which also adds admin controls and some additional features. One of the things I love is that you also have the ability to chat with your meeting summary and ask their AI feature about questions about your meetings. So if you finish up a meeting and you wanna kind of pick the AI's brain about the transcript, you can go back and ask it questions, which is really, really helpful. I also love that it integrates with Zoom and Google Meet, and it joins all your meetings automatically as long as the meeting organizer allows the note taker in. So even if I'm not able to attend the call, if I have a scheduling conflict, I can still get the meeting transcript and not fall behind on what occurred, even if I'm not able to attend live. Overall, I would say Otter is best for general business use, educational institutions, and teams that want the collaborative note taking features, but don't mind the time limits on the free tier. The final AI notetaker on our list, Fathom, offers unlimited recordings for individuals completely free. Yep. Let me repeat that. Unlimited recordings, no catch. So this alone makes it worth considering. Fathom Excels at real-time note taking and creates timestamped highlights so you can jump to the exact moment someone said something important. The interface is incredibly clean and intuitive. Probably the most user-friendly of all the tools we're discussing. One of the most unique features is the ability to create highlight reels, short video clips of the most important moments from your meeting. This is really fantastic for sharing key decisions or insights with team members who couldn't attend. Fathom also offers decent integrations with popular CRM systems, though not quite as extensive as Fireflies. It also automatically syncs with Salesforce and HubSpot and other platforms which work really well for basic use cases. The AI summary feature creates structured notes with decisions made and action items and key topics that were discussed, and I would say that the quality is really solid, though not quite as detailed as some of the premium alternatives that we've already discussed. The downside here is that it does have slightly more limited advanced features compared to Fireflies or Otter. So if you're looking for really deep conversation analytics or extensive integrations, Fathom might feel a little bit basic. If you want to upgrade, the team plans start at$32 per month for unlimited users, which is actually quite competitive for an organization-wide plan. But for solo entrepreneurs or a small team, just getting started with AI note taking, Fathom's free tier is incredibly generous. So if you are an individual or a small team who wants unlimited recordings without a premium price tag, I would say Fathom is best for you. And if you don't need extensive integrations or advanced analytics, Fathom is the choice for you. Now that we've covered all of the tools, let me share some of the advanced strategies that separate the more casual users from the true power users. First off, we've got creating your AI coaching systems. So remember that discovery call that you had two weeks ago? Well, let's dive deeper into creating a systematic approach to AI powered self-improvement. Here's my recommended workflow for you. After every important call, whether it's a sales conversation or a client meeting, or a team discussion, I recommend that you follow this three-step process. Step one is the immediate analysis. Take that transcript of that call and drop it into ChatGPT or Claude with this prompt: please analyze this conversation and identify the top three insights I should include in my follow-up plus three things I could have done better." Step two is pattern recognition. Once a week, feed your AI assistant multiple transcripts and ask:"look at these conversations. What patterns do you see in my communication style? What are my strengths and what are my blind spots?" Step three is skill development. Use the feedback to create targeted improvement goals. Maybe you discover that you interrupt people too much, or maybe you're not asking enough open-ended questions. By having chat analyze the transcripts of your conversations, you are able to identify so much potential opportunity for improvement. That frankly,, even the best manager out there would probably not call to your attention. Next, we've got the content creation pipeline. Here's a strategy that content creators and thought leaders love, which is turning expert conversation into multiple content pieces. So let's say you have a 60 minute client call where you solve a really complex problem. Here's how you're gonna multiply that value. You can extract teaching moments. Ask your AI to identify the top five most valuable insights from the conversation. Then create social media content out of it. Turn each insight into a LinkedIn post, a Twitter thread or an Instagram carousel, and then develop case studies from that. Use the problem solving process as a template for future clients, and then take that and build your knowledge base. Add the solutions to your FAQ system on your website. I know entrepreneurs who have built entire course curriculums just from their best client call transcripts. The next opportunity is academic excellence systems for students. Here's how to create a truly unfair advantage in your studies. If you have lecture recordings, ask your AI to connect the dots between the lessons. Drop in the recording transcripts and say:"what overarching themes are emerging here? How do the concepts build on each other?" Or if you have multiple recordings or transcripts from a course or a college class that you're taking, you could drop the transcripts into chat and try to understand your professor's priorities and say:"based on these lectures, what topics does this instructor spend the most time on? What concepts do they return to repeatedly?" You could even use to get an exam prediction engine, feed the AI all your lecture transcripts before an exam and ask:"based on the emphasis and the time spent on different topics, predict what's most likely to be on the exam" or ask it to create you a comprehensive study guide and say:"here are all the lectures that are going to be covered in my upcoming exam. Please help me study. Create me a study guide or quiz me on this content." There is so much potential here. Now, here's where most people just kind of stop thinking. They get their transcript, maybe they glance at the summary and they call it done. But you are missing out on some incredible opportunities here. So let me share some more creative ways that business owners and entrepreneurs and even students can turn these transcripts into pure gold. If you are a business owner or an entrepreneur, for every client call or team meeting or brainstorming session, think of the content that you could get out of every call if you pulled out the most valuable 10 minute segment, and turned it into social media content, a blog post, or even material for your next course. Obviously, it is important to get permission from those who are on the call, but you already have that conversation and that content done. It's recorded, you have it, so why not multiply that impact? In terms of training material, your new employee onboarding could be so much easier if you just record your best training sessions, and boom. You already have searchable training manuals. So when someone asks something like, how do we handle refunds again? You could point them to the exact timestamp in the transcript from three months ago, and create a vast library of resources for your new employees. For things like process documentation, if you have meeting transcripts to create standard operating procedures, then after a successful say, project kickoff meeting, that transcript becomes your template for future kickoffs. You will never forget a crucial step again. Another huge opportunity, especially for anyone who's in sales or consulting or any type of client relationship, is say you are on a discovery call. And obviously it is important to say that you wanna make sure that whoever's on the other side of your call, you wanna make sure that they know that you are recording the call for note taking purposes. But here's where the magic happens. After the call is finished, take that transcript and drop it into ChatGPT or Claude, ask it two powerful questions. First,"based on this conversation, what should I include in my proposal for this client?" You would be amazed at the insights that AI would pull out that you may have completely missed during that call. Especially if you were nervous on the call. Maybe you didn't wanna be frantically writing down notes the entire time.'cause it is important to also be making eye contact with your client. Maybe you only wrote down the big picture ideas, but. AI doesn't miss anything. So that transcript has all the little details that that client mentioned. Maybe they mentioned a specific pain point in kind of passing or hinted at a budget constraint that you may have missed in the moment. But here's the real kicker. Not only is AI going to be able to give you a summary of what you could put in that proposal for the client. Which is gonna make you look like a total rockstar when you send them your proposal. But the second question that you can ask is feedback for your own performance."How could I have asked better questions? What opportunities did I miss to dive deeper?" It's like having a sales coach review every single call with you. I've seen people improve their close rates dramatically just by getting this AI feedback after every discovery call. And it's not just for discovery calls either. This could be for coaching calls."How could I have coached this student better? How could I have performed better on this pitch?" Any call that you were on, you can take the transcript. And put it into chat and say,"coach me. Give me feedback. How did I do? How can I improve better? How can I do better next time? Where can I improve?" Think about this for a second. You're taking a relatively inexpensive note taking tool, maybe$10 to$20 a month if you're on the paid plan and you're combining it with your AI assistant, and you are creating a powerful coaching system. Now you have feedback on every single call you speak on, every discovery call. Every coaching session, every client meeting becomes a learning opportunity for you to be better. You are literally getting stronger with every conversation you have. So most business coaches charge hundreds of dollars per session, and here you are getting personalized coaching feedback for the cost of what a lunch? That's the kind of leverage that separates successful entrepreneurs from everyone else. So if you are not recording your sessions and actually using those transcripts for self-improvement, you are missing out on a massive opportunity. And here's another opportunity to level up. This is like pro, pro, pro tip. If you are selling on a sales presentation or a webinar or a any type of pitch, don't just get the audio transcript, download the chat transcript too, drop both of them into your AI assistant and ask it to analyze what questions your audience had during the presentation. This is going to give you incredible insights into what resonated, where people were confused, and what objections came up that you might have missed. And that is something important. Because if you are selling, say on a webinar. There's the same questions coming up over and over and over again in the chat and ChatGPT can analyze that. It's going to be able to tell you how to improve and it can analyze all of that from the transcript of both your pitch and the chat that happened while you were pitching. That is incredibly powerful data. Now if chat is giving you glowing feedback,"you did great. What a good job." Push back on it some and say,"please be tough on me. Give me constructive criticism so I can improve." Sometimes AI assistants tend to be overly polite, which is great. We love polite, but if you want brutal honesty, if you're serious about getting better, the goal isn't just to give you glowing praise about your performance, it's to actually improve. So it's okay to push back and say,"tell me where people were confused. Tell me how I can improve." Please be, you know, you don't want it to be like savage, but it's okay to say,"please be tough with me and tell me how I can improve." All right, so let's make this actionable. Here is my recommended step-by-step plan for you to get started with AI note taking today. Step one, choose and set up Pick one tool based on the recommendations in this episode, and start with the free tier. Don't overthink it. Set up your account and connect it to your calendar so it starts recording your meetings today. Then I would recommend that you record two to three low key meetings or calls. Get comfortable with how the tool works and how to access your transcripts. Next step, take one of your transcripts and try the AI analysis techniques we've discussed and see what insights that you can extract. Finally, decide which types of meetings that you're gonna regularly record, how you're gonna store them, how you're gonna organize your transcripts, and what your weekly review process is going to look like. Here's some common mistakes to avoid. Mistake number one is recording everything. I highly recommend that you start selective record, important meetings. Not every single casual chat. That's the easy way to overwhelm yourself and therefore not use your transcripts because you just have too much. Mistake number two is ignoring your audio quality. Bad audio means bad transcripts. I recommend that you invest in some basic audio equipment. I will link my recommendations in the show notes. You certainly do not need podcast quality equipment if you are not recording a podcast, but you do wanna have decent equipment so that you do get good level recordings. Mistake number three is forgetting to inform participants. It is always important to get consent. Most of these will automatically inform your meeting participants that the meeting is being recorded, but make sure, especially when recording clients that you let them know that the meeting is being recorded. It just ensures that everybody has that open trust. Mistake number four is the set and forget mentality. The magic happens when you're actively using the transcripts, not just letting them sit on the digital shelf. Mistake number five is not backing up important recordings. These tools are obviously generally very reliable, but important conversations deserve a backup storage. So if there is something that you would be devastated if it was lost, consider a duplicate backup system such as Google Drive or Dropbox. Here's what I want you to understand. The real power of AI note taking isn't in any single transcript or meeting. It's in the compound effect of systematically improving your communication skills over time. So every analyzed call makes you slightly better at the next one. Every pattern that you identify helps you to make better decisions. And every insight that you extract adds to your professional knowledge base. So six months from now, you'll look back and realize that the simple decision to start recording and analyzing your conversations was a major turning point in your business or academic performance. And there you have it. AI note taking tools aren't just convenient. They are truly transformative when you use them to their full potential. If you're not worried about capturing every little detail, you can actually be present in your meetings. You can ask better questions, contribute more meaningfully, and build stronger relationships. Most of these tools do offer really generous, free plans, so there's no reason not to experiment. Pick one that matches your needs. Give it a test run for a few weeks and let me know what you think. If this helped you out today, make sure to subscribe and leave me a review, and if you try one of these tools, I would love to hear about your experience. Thanks so much for tuning in to this episode of Tech Savvy 101. I'll see you really soon.