Meeting notes were the first AI habit a lot of firms picked up, and often the most careless one. A free bot quietly joining client calls is a data-protection problem waiting to happen. The tools themselves are very good now, so the difference between a time saving and an incident comes down to the rules around them, and those rules are short.
| Type | Examples | The trade-off |
|---|---|---|
| Built into your suite | Copilot in Teams, Gemini in Meet | Governance comes free; features lag behind |
| Standalone notetakers | Otter, Fireflies, Granola | Best features; another processor holds your calls |
| Raw engines | Whisper lineage, commercial STT | Full control; you build the pipeline |
Built-in capture is the safe default
If your meetings run on Microsoft Teams or Google Meet, the best option is usually the one you already have. Copilot and Gemini both transcribe, summarise and pull out actions natively. The advantage is governance, not features: no outside bot in the call, recordings stored in your own tenant under retention policies you already run, and access that follows your existing permissions. For a regulated firm that’s hard to beat, and it’s what the best-AI-by-task table recommends for this job.
Standalone notetakers have the best features
Otter, Fireflies and the less well-known Granola built this category. They join calls on any platform and give you speaker-labelled transcripts, searchable archives, action lists and CRM hand-offs that go further than the suite versions. The catch is structural: a third company now holds your most candid client conversations. The vendor checks are the usual ones, taken more seriously: training exclusions, retention controls, data residency and a data processing agreement. One small upside is that the bot visibly joining the call forces the conversation about telling participants.
Raw transcription engines are for building your own
Underneath all of these are speech-to-text engines, the Whisper lineage and its commercial rivals, sold by the audio hour. You use them to build your own pipeline: dictation straight into your systems, call recordings feeding drafting automations, or a searchable archive. That’s how I use transcription in my own systems, because it makes meeting capture one step in a workflow instead of another app: transcript in, suitability draft or file note out, a person approving. The meeting-notes-to-CRM playbook walks through that build.
Four rules to settle before the first recorded call
Write these four decisions down before anyone presses record:
- Notice and consent: in the invite and out loud, and honour any objection.
- Scope: which meeting types are never recorded, starting with privileged client conversations and HR.
- Checking: anything consequential is checked against the recording before it goes into a client file, because transcripts still mishear and misattribute.
- Retention: set by your client-file policy, with vendor defaults overridden, because several tools keep everything forever.
It’s about ten minutes of policy, and the UK governance guide shows which rule each decision answers to.