How to Transcribe Meetings With AI (5 Free Tools Tested)

Note-taking is the least fun part of every meeting, and it’s the part nobody should be doing by hand anymore. AI transcription tools listen to your calls, turn speech into searchable text, tag who’s speaking, and — the part that actually saves the day — turn the transcript into action items you can send before everyone forgets what was decided.

I spent a week in October 2026 running the free tiers of five leading tools — Otter.ai, Fireflies.ai, Notta, Krisp, and Granola — on the same recorded 28-minute mock meeting: three speakers, one video call, one phone-quality segment with background noise. This guide shows what each one actually gave me for free, where the limits hit, and the transcript-to-action-items workflow that turns raw text into follow-up your team will actually read.

Published: October 17, 2026 · Last updated: October 17, 2026

What are the two ways to transcribe a meeting with AI?

Every tool below uses one of two capture methods, and the choice matters more than most marketing pages admit.

1. Meeting-bot capture. The tool sends a bot (OtterPilot, Fred from Fireflies, Notta’s bot) that joins your Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams call as a visible participant. Connect your calendar once, and the bot shows up automatically, records, transcribes, and emails you a summary when the call ends. The advantage: it works on any device, and the recording lives in the cloud. The tradeoff: everyone sees a bot named “Fireflies.ai Notetaker” sitting in the participant list, which some clients find odd.

2. Bot-free / device capture. The tool runs as an app on your computer and captures your device’s audio (Krisp, Granola), or records your screen audio without joining the call. Nothing appears in the participant list, so the meeting looks completely normal. The tradeoff: it depends on your machine being present and working, and — important for the consent section below — nothing announces the recording for you.

There’s also post-meeting transcription: uploading an existing audio or video file (Zoom cloud recordings, voice memos, phone calls). Most tools support it, but free-tier upload caps are tight — Otter gives you 3 file imports for the lifetime of the free account, for example.

Do I need everyone’s permission to record a meeting with AI?

Short version: tell people, always. Beyond being polite, it’s law in many places. About a dozen US states — including California, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Washington — are all-party (often called “two-party”) consent states: every person being recorded must consent. In the rest, one-party consent usually suffices, but company policy and client contracts often demand more than the legal minimum.

Three habits that keep you safe:

1. Put it in the calendar invite. One line — “This meeting will be AI-transcribed for notes” — covers you before anyone joins.
2. Announce it at the start. “I’m recording this with an AI notetaker; speak now if you’d rather I didn’t.” Takes ten seconds.
3. Use the bot when it matters. Bot tools self-disclose: the participant list shows the notetaker. With bot-free tools (Krisp, Granola), the disclosure is entirely on you — the software won’t announce itself.

I’m not a lawyer, and this isn’t legal advice — if you record client calls in regulated industries, check with yours.

How I tested the 5 free tools

To compare fairly, I used one test artifact for all five: a 28-minute recorded meeting with three speakers discussing a product launch (budget, deadlines, feature cuts), including one segment recorded on a noisy phone connection. I scored each tool on:

• Free allowance — how many minutes you actually get per month or day.
• Speaker labels — can it tell who said what without manual cleanup?
• Bot behavior — does a bot join the call, and how visible is it?
• Summary and action items — does the AI output read like a colleague’s notes or a word dump?
• Where the free tier breaks — the cap or limit you’ll actually hit first.

One caveat, stated plainly: accuracy depends heavily on your accents, jargon, and call quality. My observations below describe what happened with my test recording; your mileage will vary. Run your own week of real meetings through the free tier before paying for anything.

1. Otter.ai — the generous free tier for short meetings

Otter.ai‘s free Basic plan is the most straightforward deal in this lineup: 300 transcription minutes a month, forever free. That’s about ten 30-minute meetings a month — enough for a real person with a normal calendar, not just a trial.

On my test recording, Otter’s speaker identification was the most reliable of the five: it tagged all three speakers correctly and only slipped when two people talked over each other. The transcript arrived with real-time highlighting while it processed, and the post-meeting summary landed about two minutes after the call with decisions and action items already separated. Otter AI Chat — ask “what did the client say about the timeline?” — answered from the transcript accurately.

The catches, and they’re real: a 30-minute cap per conversation, so any meeting that runs long gets cut; 3 file imports for the lifetime of the account, which makes post-meeting transcription of old recordings nearly useless on free; and only your 25 most recent conversations stay in history. Review aggregates from 2026 note Otter draws more accuracy complaints than Fireflies or Fathom — mostly misheard technical terms — so it shines with clear, everyday language.

Bot behavior: OtterPilot joins as a visible participant after you connect your calendar. It even works when you can’t attend — handy for skipping a meeting you only needed the notes from.

Best for: people whose meetings are mostly 30 minutes or under and who want a set-and-forget bot.

2. Fireflies.ai — unlimited transcription, capped storage

Fireflies.ai has the most interesting free economics: unlimited transcription and AI summaries, but only 400 minutes of team storage and about 20 AI credits a month. In practice, you can transcribe as much as you like; you just can’t keep all of it. Older meetings get trimmed or locked behind the paywall.

Fred — the bot — joined my test call promptly and showed up in the participant list by name. Transcription covered 100+ supported languages, and the vendor claims 99% English accuracy (their own number; treat vendor accuracy claims as marketing). The standout was AskFred: I asked questions across the whole meeting library, and it pulled answers from multiple transcripts, not just the latest one. If your bottleneck is follow-up automation and CRM writes rather than the transcript itself, Fireflies pushes notes into Salesforce, HubSpot, and Slack harder than anyone else here.

Best for: sales teams and heavy meeting people who want unlimited capture and don’t mind losing old transcripts to the storage cap.

3. Notta — the multilingual pick (with a tiny free cap)

Notta is the strongest option in this lineup for bilingual or multilingual teams: real-time transcription in 58 languages with translation in 42, including bilingual side-by-side transcripts. The vendor advertises up to 98.86% accuracy on clean audio — again, a vendor number, but independent reviewers rate its accuracy as competitive with or ahead of Otter.

The free plan’s 3-minute cap per conversation is the catch that changes everything: I had to chop my 28-minute test meeting into segments to transcribe it, which tells you all you need to know about using free Notta for real meetings. You get 120 minutes a month total, 10 AI summaries, and speaker identification — but each recording dies at the three-minute mark. The free tier is a demo of the product, not a tool you can run on. The Pro plan ($8.17/month annual) is where real usage starts.

Best for: testing multilingual transcription and translation before committing; teams with non-English meetings should trial it seriously.

4. Krisp — bot-free, and the noise killer

Krisp is the odd one out in the best way: it started as an AI noise-cancellation tool and grew meeting transcription later. No bot joins your calls — the desktop app captures your device’s audio directly, so the meeting looks completely normal to everyone else. On my test recording’s noisy phone segment, Krisp was the only tool that produced a usable transcript without me cleaning the audio first; the keyboard clatter and background chatter just vanished.

The free plan gives you bot-free recording with 2 AI meeting summaries and action items per day and a 7-day meeting history. Transcripts on the free tier are English-only. The daily meter is the part to watch: two summaries a day is fine for one or two calls, but a day of back-to-back meetings will force you to choose which ones get the AI treatment. The privacy story is strong — audio processing happens on your device, so conversations never need to leave your computer.

Best for: noisy environments (cafes, shared offices, construction next door) and anyone who wants transcription without a bot announcing itself.

5. Granola — notes that read like a colleague wrote them

Granola takes a different philosophy: instead of a transcript dump, it enhances the rough notes you jot during the meeting into a structured summary with action items and follow-ups. No bot joins the call — it captures your device’s audio locally, so sensitive external meetings look completely normal. The free Basic plan offers unlimited AI meeting notes, which sounds too generous until you find the real limit: only a rolling 30-day window of history. Notes older than 30 days stay stored but locked until you upgrade.

On my test recording, Granola’s output read the most like a human wrote it — because my own jottings shaped the summary rather than a generic template. That’s also its weakness: if you take no notes, the AI has less to work with, and speaker identification is still weak in meetings with three or more participants (my test tagged everyone generically at times). Native apps cover macOS, Windows, iOS, and Android, and it handles in-person meetings too. SOC 2 Type II and GDPR compliant, though the default individual-plan setting allows model training — opt out in settings if that bothers you.

Best for: client-facing consultants and anyone who takes rough notes anyway and wants them polished automatically.

Free meeting transcription tools compared

Side by side, the free tiers differ most in what’s metered — minutes, storage, summaries, or history:

Figures from each vendor’s official pricing page, checked October 2026. Free plans change — confirm before you commit.

How do I turn a transcript into action items?

A raw transcript is a haystack; action items are the needles. Every tool above generates some version of AI notes, but for follow-up people actually read, I run the transcript through a second pass with this prompt — in ChatGPT or Copilot:

Prompt: “From this meeting transcript, produce: (1) Decisions made, one line each. (2) Action items as a table: task, owner, deadline (say ‘no deadline stated’ if none). (3) Open questions still unresolved. Keep it under 200 words.”

Paste the transcript below it. The constraint matters — uncapped, the AI will happily summarize for a page and nobody reads it. Two refinements that sharpen the output: ask it to quote the exact sentence where each decision was made (kills hallucinations), and to flag anything it wasn’t sure about rather than guessing an owner.

If your team lives in Microsoft 365, this is also the workflow where ChatGPT vs Microsoft Copilot gets interesting — Copilot can see the meeting inside Teams directly, while ChatGPT needs the pasted transcript but writes better, tighter follow-ups. And if meeting notes are just one of several workflows you’re automating, our 10 AI workflows for small businesses puts transcription alongside invoicing, scheduling, and customer follow-up.

Which tool should you start with?

Match the tool to your constraint:

• Mostly 30-minute internal standups? Otter.ai — 300 free minutes and the most reliable speaker labels.
• Back-to-back sales calls? Fireflies.ai — unlimited transcription; accept the storage cap.
• Meetings in two languages? Notta — nothing else free comes close on translation.
• Noisy home office or client calls where a bot looks odd? Krisp or Granola — both bot-free; Krisp if noise is the problem, Granola if polished notes are.

None of these five requires a credit card for the free tier, so the honest test costs you nothing: run the same meeting through two of them for a week and read the transcripts side by side. The differences that matter — how it handles your accents, your jargon, your crosstalk — only show up in your own calls. And if you want AI note-taking that covers more than meetings, our roundup of the best AI note-taking apps picks up where transcription leaves off.

Frequently asked questions