If you’ve ever been assigned to take notes in a meeting, you know the struggles. You’re trying to write down what every person said accurately, but if your attention shifts for just a moment, you might miss an important detail. It’s harder to participate in the discussion fully if you’re occupied with listening and typing. Then after your meeting, you need to clean up your notes, capture crucial next steps, and send your summary to the rest of the team. All these tasks eat away at your ability to be productive and can stop collaboration in its tracks. But help is at hand: an AI note-taker is just the tool you need.
Many people are turning to AI meeting apps and tools to automate note-taking and summarize meeting information. It’s like having an AI assistant by your side during meetings, taking notes and keeping track of discussion items so you can focus on the conversation.
In the first installation of our AI productivity series, see how you can benefit from an AI note-taking tool — and why it just might become your new best friend in meetings.
How does AI note-taking work?
Generative AI models are perhaps best known for generating messages based on a prompt, but they’re also great at summarizing information. They use natural language processing (NLP) to synthesize longer messages into short summaries that include key information about the text.
An AI notetaker uses the transcript from a conversation as the text input to generate a meeting summary of what was discussed, as well as identify key action items based on the context of the call.
Most AI note-taking apps require a full meeting recording to generate a meeting summary. If you don’t want your meeting recorded, look for a tool that doesn’t require it — for instance, Zoom AI Companion can generate a meeting summary with just a temporary transcript (more on that below).
Why use an AI note-taker in your meeting?
Taking notes during meetings and sharing notes and action items with colleagues can take up a fair amount of time at work. According to a recent survey conducted by Morning Consult,* nearly 75% of team leaders said they perform these tasks at least a few times a week, and 48% of leaders surveyed said they spend more time than they want taking notes.
An AI note-taker can help you save time, but there’s more to it than that. Here are a few advantages of using an AI note-taking app:
No more multitasking in your meeting
When you’re taking notes, you’re focused on the task at hand, not on what you can contribute to the discussion. Let your AI note-taker do the work, and you can be a full participant in the meeting.
No more missed details
Have you ever had to step away from a meeting for a second, only to miss an important detail? An AI note-taker doesn’t need to take breaks, so you can rest assured your meeting notes will be comprehensive.
More efficient use of time
It takes time to clean up your notes and organize them after every call before you can share them with others. AI-powered meeting notes are ready to share as soon as they’re generated.
Helping you catch up on missed meetings
If you have a packed schedule and are double-booked, don’t worry. Instead of asking colleagues for an update (and relying on their notes, which might be incomplete), an AI-generated meeting summary can help you catch up on what you missed.
Using AI Companion’s meeting summary for note-taking
The good news is that you may already have the AI-powered note-taking capabilities you need to get automatic notes delivered to your inbox after every Zoom meeting. Zoom AI Companion, your AI assistant, is included at no additional cost with the paid services assigned to your Zoom user account.** (If you don’t have an eligible paid Zoom plan, upgrade today to access the benefits of AI Companion.)
AI Companion can help you with tasks across the Zoom platform, but summarizing meetings has been our most popular capability. In three months, AI Companion has generated over 2.8 million meeting summaries — that’s a lot of time saved from not having to take notes!
AI Companion uses a temporary meeting transcript to generate a detailed summary of your meeting, so you don’t need to record the meeting if you don’t want to. It organizes your meeting summary by topic so you can read about what was discussed and who said what. Crucially, it also identifies any next steps or action items based on the content of the meeting. And if you just want a short paragraph on what the meeting was about, check out the quick recap at the top for an abridged version.
Global teams, take note: AI Companion has expanded language support beyond English with meeting summaries available in 32 additional languages (in preview)!
Ready to get AI-powered note-taking assistance in your meetings — plus other productivity tools to help you throughout your workday? Check out our getting started guide for everything you need to know about making the most of AI Companion.
*Based on an online survey of 11,023 full-time knowledge workers in the U.S., U.K., Ireland, Germany, France, Japan, Singapore, and Australia. Conducted by Morning Consult on behalf of Zoom Video Communications, Inc., between August 10–25, 2023.
**Note: AI Companion may not be available for all regions and industry verticals.
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