Key takeaways
- The right note taker (AI powered or otherwise) depends on your workflow, not the feature list.
- Your use case, environment, and timing needs determine which tools are a good fit.
- Decisions on form factor (bot vs. botless), artifacts needed (audio, video, etc), and ability to record on any operating system all affect the experience.
- Budget and scale are key. Personal use is more simple, while org-wide needs to adhere to any internal rules for software such as security and device policies.
- If nothing off-the-shelf fits, building on Recall.ai's Notetaker API gives you flexibility to build the note taker you need without rebuilding the entire recording stack.
Choosing a meeting note taker isn’t as simple as picking the tool with the longest feature list. The real question is whether it fits the way your team works, including the platforms you use, the level of detail you need, and how you plan to use the information after the call. This note taker checklist walks you through the questions that shape your choice, setting you up for a clearer understanding of what a digital meeting assistant can offer.
What is a meeting note taker?
A basic meeting note taker is software that either joins a call as a participant or records using a Desktop Recording SDK, captures what’s said, and returns the diarized transcript of the call. From there, a note taker can take on many different roles. It can pass the transcript to an AI model for sentiment analysis, provide a detailed summary of decisions that were made, or generate action items. Some note takers go further. They can send the action items to participants via email, update a customer relationship management (CRM) tool with the contents of the call, or provide talk time reports and advice for call coaching. Such apps go beyond the basic note taker, but all require a note taker at the core to power the insights that they provide.
At its core, a note taker removes the pressure of writing everything down and gives teams a reliable recording they can revisit or build on later. With the right setup, it can even provide more context than a trained stenographer would capture. This can include diarized, timestamped transcripts alongside participant events like muting, unmuting, camera changes, and screen sharing, though not every tool offers that full level of detail.
How to choose between note takers
Different teams have different requirements from a note taker. The questions below help you narrow the field, highlight key features, and decide which type of tool makes sense for your workflow.
1. What’s your use case?
Before comparing features, it helps to be clear on why you need a note taker in the first place. A general purpose tool might be enough if you just need transcripts and a clean summary. But if you’re supporting a specific workflow, the requirements expand. Here are a few common scenarios:
- Hiring teams: Need meeting data that can flow into an applicant tracking system (ATS). They also need a notetaker that can join interviews even when the original organizer isn’t present, since recruiters often schedule calls they don’t attend themselves.
- Sales teams: Need CRM compatibility so call notes appear where reps already work.
- Incident management teams: Need a tool that works immediately and captures all resulting action items. These should be assigned to the right owners so remediation happens quickly and retrospectives remain thorough.
- Product teams: Need clean transcripts and recordings for research and user feedback reviews.
- Healthcare providers: Need a notetaker that can be paused and resumed to respect patient privacy. Quieter recording options (such as desktop-based tools) also help reduce intrusion and make patients feel more at ease during sensitive conversations.
Your use case becomes the first filter. A note taker that fits naturally into your existing systems will save far more time than one with a long feature list that misses your key uses.
When choosing between note takers, ensure that they can provide the context for any analysis you want to run or flow into an ATS, CRM, or workflow-specific system. All meeting note takers powered by Recall.ai are able to provide the meeting metadata, along with recording, transcripts, and participant events.
2. Is your note taker for school or work?
Your environment shapes what you need from a note taker. Academic use is usually straightforward: capture the lecture, generate an accurate transcript, and produce a clear summary you can reference later. Students generally don’t need advanced metadata or participant-level detail.
Work settings are a different story. Teams often need more structure around the meeting data itself, especially when multiple people contribute. Features like speaker identification, participant events, and support for business tools (such as calendars or collaboration platforms) become more important because the notes aren’t just for one person, but feed into shared workflows.
Tools built on a robust Meeting Recording API can support both individual and collaborative use cases with ease. In cases where your use case is simple, you have one device recording, and you just need to store the transcript on your machine, most note takers suffice. If you are part of a team, you may want to consider tools that provide participant emails, have perfect diarization, and provide participant event data for deeper context.
3. When do you need the data?
Some teams need information as the meeting unfolds, while others are perfectly fine reviewing everything afterward. While real-time transcripts feel necessary, in most standard use cases, the important metric when you consider latency is delivery of artifacts like transcripts and recordings after the call. Real-time transcripts are helpful in situations where someone needs to follow along live, reference details mid-discussion, or power an interactive workflow.
Post-call summaries work well for any use case where you need the meeting data after the call. In situations like sales tools that update your CRM, hiring tools that provide a transcript of the interview, or use cases where your team needs action items delivered to participants after the call, receiving the transcript right after the meeting works well. In all of these cases, ensuring that the latency doesn’t increase with the length of the meeting is important so that follow-ups can go out immediately after the call rather than being delayed by unpredictable processing times.
If real-time interaction is necessary, make sure that your note taker can support real-time transcripts and stream audio and video to you. If timing affects how you interpret or act on the information, prioritizing a note taker that can deliver transcripts instantly is worth it. The best tools give you both options so you aren’t forced into one workflow.
4. Do you need calendar integration or ad hoc recording?
Some teams rely on their note taker to automatically join scheduled meetings without any manual setup. Others prefer to trigger recording only when needed, such as for spontaneous calls or sensitive conversations. The right choice depends on how structured your schedule is and how much friction you’re willing to tolerate.
Calendar integration is especially useful when meetings are planned in advance and need consistent coverage. It allows a notetaker to join without human intervention, ensuring nothing is missed even if the organizer isn’t present. Ad hoc recording, on the other hand, gives you more control and flexibility but requires someone to initiate it each time.
If your team runs on tightly scheduled workflows, automation can remove a surprising amount of friction. If your meetings are more fluid or situational, a manual trigger may feel more appropriate and intentional.
5. Do you need a bot vs botless note taker?
It’s important to ask yourself if you want a note taker that shows up in the meeting as a visible participant or one that operates in the background. A meeting bot makes its presence clear and can interact with the meeting directly by receiving chat messages, listening to participants, and responding with context-aware output. Botless setups, like those supported by Recall.ai’s Desktop Recording SDK, can feel more discreet, running on a device instead of joining the call, which some teams prefer for a quieter experience.
Both options have trade-offs. Meeting bots, using AI agents, offer richer interactions as they can become a functional participant in meetings. Using real-time audio, video, and participant events, AI agents are able to interact with participants in the same way a human would. In order to speak, send chat messages, or share screen, a meeting bot requires access to an output media API like the one offered by Recall.ai.
On the flipside, botless tools are able to inconspicuously capture the conversation data, but cannot participate in the meeting.
6. Where do your meetings take place?
Some note takers work only in virtual meetings, which is fine if your conversations always happen on meeting platforms like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, or Google Meet. But if you want to work outside of these platforms, you’ll need a note taker that can capture in-person conversations and phone calls, not just meetings hosted on video conferencing software.
This is where the recording method matters. Tools built using system and mic audio allow you to record in-person meetings as well as virtual or hybrid meetings, but require machine diarization to distinguish between speakers and cannot provide speaker names for everyone in the meeting.
If your meetings happen in desktop and web clients then a chrome extension will not work as it cannot record the meeting happening in desktop apps such as the Zoom or Microsoft Teams desktop apps. If your meetings are all on meeting platforms, then, depending on the architecture, a meeting bot can allow you to access separate streams which is the gold standard for producing diarized transcripts. If your recordings happen on mobile, then a notetaker built on a Mobile Recording SDK is necessary.
When deciding on a note taker, you need to make sure that your note taker can record in all of the places your meetings take place or you will end up with a collage of different note takers which adds a great deal of thrash from tool and context switching. Choosing a note taker that can record across devices will save you from managing multiple tools or gaps in your meeting history.
7. Do you need to see what happened in the meeting?
Not all note takers treat video the same way. Some skip visuals entirely and capture only audio, which is fine if you exclusively care about transcripts. Others record the full video feed using tabCapture which shows all of the popups that came up during the meeting, such as Google suggesting to your meeting bot or chrome extension that they use Gemini.
Still others, create composite videos that provide the most polished visual representation of the meeting. And finally, some note taking tools go further by generating a highlight reel or montage that reflects what each participant saw during the call. Tools using Recall.ai’s Meeting Bot API or Desktop Recording SDK create polished videos and can add functionality like highlight reels that pair transcript and video to give users the most important parts of the meeting.
This matters if your meetings rely heavily on screen shares, demos, or visual cues. Having a video record can make it easier to revisit product walkthroughs, design reviews, or onboarding sessions without digging through long transcripts.
8. What’s your budget?
Pricing can vary a lot between note takers, so it helps to think about how often you’ll actually use the tool and what your usage pattern will be. Some products charge per seat, others per minute or hour, and some bundle everything into a flat subscription with payments either monthly, annually. Others offer a one-time payment model that provides ongoing or lifetime access. Note takers can also offer various tiers that include different features. While features should be the primary driver, ensuring that cost is not prohibitive for your needs is an important consideration.
If you’re weighing an off-the-shelf tool against building your own, factor in engineering time and what features you are not building in order to build a custom note taker. Custom solutions offer more control, but ongoing maintenance, model tuning, and cross-platform support can become surprisingly expensive. Using an infrastructure layer like Recall.ai reduces that overhead because you’re not managing some of the hardest parts, which include capturing recordings, storing transcripts, handling participants, and keeping integrations up to date. Even still, if an existing notetaker covers your use case, it is often cheaper than building in-house.
9. Do you want to share or make private notes?
Much like in the work vs academic setting, some people want their notes to land exactly where the team works, for instance, a Slack channel, an email thread, or a shared workspace. Others prefer to keep certain notes private, especially when they’re capturing reminders, coaching points, or early thoughts that aren’t ready to distribute. Choosing a note taker based on your preference for distributing notes or keeping them for yourself can be a helpful consideration when exploring notetaking options.
Look at how easily the tool lets you control visibility. Can you share a summary with one click? Can you keep specific sections or entire meetings private? Does the tool handle both team-ready exports and personal note-taking without friction? In the cases where sharing notes is important, making sure that your note taker can gather participant emails becomes more important so that you are not manually collecting emails and copying and pasting the output from your note taker.
10. Personal solution or organization-wide?
The scale of your rollout shapes almost every decision. If you’re choosing a basic note taker just for yourself, most off-the-shelf tools will do the job. You’ll get clean transcripts, a solid summary, and maybe a few integrations you already use. You don’t need deep customization, and you’re not managing permissions or system-wide consistency.
Things shift once an entire team or department enters the picture. Org-wide use means different roles, different workflows, and different requirements for how meeting data moves through the company. You may need stronger controls around privacy, reliability across multiple meeting platforms, or the ability to plug transcripts and recordings into internal systems. In the case of an entire organization adopting one note taker, investing in a solution that has been built with permissions, distribution, and security in mind makes sense.
If you can’t find the right note taker
Sometimes the tool you need doesn’t exist yet. Maybe your workflow spans multiple meeting platforms, or you need deeper data than standard note takers provide. Or maybe you’re building something entirely new and the off-the-shelf options can’t keep up.
In this case, a custom solution becomes the easiest path. Recall.ai's Notetaker API gives you the building blocks without the heavy lift. You’ll have access to multiple form factors including Recall.ai's industry-leading Meeting Bot API, Desktop Recording SDK, and Mobile Recording SDK. Recall.ai’s infrastructure is trusted to process billions of minutes of calls each year for more than 1,000 customers. You also get access to more meeting data than any other meeting recording or transcription API, giving you the freedom to design a note-taking experience that fits your product instead of the other way around.
