Is an AI meeting notetaker worth it when half my calls are on someone else's platform? Meetings

These are two different product categories and you should pick deliberately. One kind sends a bot that joins as a participant — works on any platform, visible to everyone, and some client legal teams hate it. The other kind records your device audio locally and never appears in the meeting at all. With three platforms and client-side lawyers, the second kind avoids a lot of conversations. Free tiers vary wildly too: a few hundred minutes a month at one, unlimited recording with a handful of summaries at another.

Time saved is real but not where I expected. It didn't save me the note-taking, it saved me the twenty minutes after every call where I used to write up actions. What it produces is a good action list and a mediocre summary. I read the actions every time and the summary about once a fortnight.

Check your own rules before you check the products. Plenty of organisations have a recording policy, and in a fair number of places all-party consent is the legal default rather than a courtesy. Ask whoever handles that at your company before you expense anything — it's a much shorter conversation before than after.

The bit nobody mentions: where the notes end up. If they live in the tool's own web app you now have a second notes system, and your actual notes are split across two places you'll search separately forever. I only kept mine once I'd got it dumping into the same folder as everything else.

Whatever you use, still write three lines yourself during the call. Deciding what mattered is the useful part of note-taking, and outsourcing that entirely made me measurably worse in meetings.

Cheap version I ran for a year: record locally, transcribe it yourself, keep the text file. Costs nothing per month, costs you an afternoon of setup, and nothing leaves your machine. Worth it if the confidentiality angle is doing any real work in your decision.