--- title: "How to get AI to take meeting notes in Zoom" url: https://howtogetaito.com/take/meeting-notes/in-zoom/ published: 2026-09-22 updated: 2026-09-22 author: "Jack Stovell" author_profile: https://i.hilyt.it/jack publisher: "Adapt Progress Evolve" summary: "What a free Zoom account already gives you (three ZoomMate summaries a month and local recording), what Pro adds, and the route that never runs out: record on your own computer, transcribe with Whisper, and run three prompts for decisions, actions and the follow-up email." tools: ["Zoom AI Companion","Whisper","Otter.ai","Fireflies","tl;dv","Granola"] language: en-GB --- # How to get AI to take meeting notes in Zoom > What a free Zoom account already gives you (three ZoomMate summaries a month and local recording), what Pro adds, and the route that never runs out: record on your own computer, transcribe with Whisper, and run three prompts for decisions, actions and the follow-up email. Published 2026-09-22 · Last updated 2026-09-22 · By Jack Stovell (https://i.hilyt.it/jack) · Canonical page: https://howtogetaito.com/take/meeting-notes/in-zoom/ ## What you'll be able to do By the end of this you should have a set of meeting notes that actually says something useful: decisions made, actions with an owner and a date attached, and any open questions nobody answered. You'll also have a version you can paste straight into an email to the team afterwards. Some of this comes free from Zoom itself. Some of it needs a workaround involving a local recording and a free transcription tool. I'll cover both, because plenty of people reading this are on the free Basic plan and don't want to be told to upgrade. ## Before you start Zoom's AI features are now branded ZoomMate. Older help pages, and this site's own catalogue entry, still say "AI Companion", so don't panic if the names don't match up. What matters is it's built into Zoom itself. No bot joins your call. No extra window asking to be let in. It's just there, in the toolbar, if your plan and settings allow it. The first thing to sort out is: whose meeting is it? This matters more than people expect. Only the HOST's plan controls what AI features are available, not yours. If you're joining someone else's meeting and they're on Zoom Pro with unlimited AI note-taking, you get the benefit of that when they choose to share it. If you're hosting on the free Basic plan, you're working with three meeting summaries a month, three uses of AI note-taking a month, and three meetings where in-meeting questions work. After that, it's zero until next month, regardless of how important the meeting is. Basic also caps meetings at 40 minutes and only lets you record locally, meaning the file lands on your own computer rather than in the cloud. Pro and above removes the 40-minute wall, gives you cloud recording, unlimited summaries, unlimited AI note-taking, and recording transcripts as a bonus. There are two separate things going on here and it's worth keeping them apart in your head. There's the ZoomMate summary, which is Zoom's AI reading the meeting and producing decisions, actions, and a written recap. And there's recording plus transcription, which is just a copy of what was said, word for word, that you then feed to something else (or read yourself). Use the summary route when you've got the allowance and just want it done. Use the recording-and-transcribe route when you're out of summaries, or you want more control over the prompts you run against the transcript. One more thing before you touch a single setting: tell people you're recording or summarising. Zoom shows a notice to everyone in the meeting when recording starts, so it's not hidden. But a notice on screen isn't the same as consent in the way clients or HR expect. In the UK you're generally allowed to record a call you're part of. That doesn't mean you should skip saying it out loud. Say it every time, especially if the meeting touches anything regulated, medical, legal or financial. ## Get set up If you're hosting, log into the Zoom web portal (not the desktop app, the actual website) and check your account settings for AI Companion or ZoomMate options. You want the meeting summary setting either switched on, or set to start automatically. The exact path through the settings menu changes as Zoom updates things, so rather than me describing buttons that might not exist by the time you read this, go to Zoom's own help centre at support.zoom.com and search "meeting summary." That page stays current. This one won't always. If you're joining someone else's meeting, there's nothing to set up on your end. You'll just see a notice if the host turns AI features on, and you'll get the summary afterwards if they choose to share it with you. If you're on Basic and you've already used your three summaries this month, don't wait around hoping a fourth appears. It won't. Skip straight to the local recording route, which I'll cover in a second, because that's completely separate from your summary allowance and doesn't run out. ## Try it yourself Here's what an actual meeting looks like end to end. As host, once the meeting's running, click the ZoomMate (AI Companion) icon in the meeting toolbar and start the summary. Everyone in the meeting sees a small notice telling them AI note-taking is active. That's it. You don't need to do anything else during the meeting. Talk normally. After the meeting ends, the summary lands with the host, either by email or inside the Zoom web portal under your meeting history. From there the host decides who else gets a copy, so if you were expecting it and haven't seen it, check with whoever hosted. If you're doing the free-route instead (because you're out of summaries, or you're not fussed about ZoomMate at all), go to Record, then "Record on this computer." On Basic this gives you an .mp4 video file and a separate .m4a audio file, both saved locally once the meeting finishes and Zoom finishes converting them. Don't close Zoom the second the meeting ends. Give it a minute or two to finish that conversion or you'll end up with nothing. Once you've got the audio file, run it through something like MacWhisper if you're on a Mac, which uses the free Whisper model and does the whole thing on your own machine, no upload required. Or upload the audio to an assistant that accepts audio files directly. Either way, you end up with a text transcript, and that's when the real prompt work starts. ``` Here is a Zoom meeting transcript. List (1) every decision made, (2) every action with owner and due date, (3) open questions with who needs to answer. Where an owner or date was not said, write "unclear", do not guess. Transcript: [paste] ``` ``` From this transcript, list everything I (speaker: [your name]) committed to doing, with my exact words and any date I gave: [paste] ``` ``` Draft a follow-up email to the attendees: two lines of context, decisions as bullets, actions as bullets with owners and dates, one open question. Plain English, no filler: [paste] ``` Run all three if you've got the time. They each do something different: one gives you the full picture, one checks what you personally agreed to (genuinely useful, because everyone forgets), and the last one produces something you can actually send. ## Check the result Don't just trust the output because it looks tidy. Run these checks. First, names. Read the summary and ask whether it's correctly attributed who said what, or whether it's guessed based on who talked most. Zoom's transcription is generally decent but it does slip on names, especially unusual ones or ones said quickly. Second, decisions versus discussion. A good summary separates "we agreed to move the launch to March" from "we talked about maybe moving the launch." If everything reads like a decision was made and you know for a fact half of it was just chat going nowhere, that's a problem. Third, actions with owners and dates. Every action should have a name and a date attached, or the word "unclear" if it genuinely wasn't said. If the AI has invented a date nobody mentioned, that's worse than no date at all. Fourth, check the first ten minutes specifically. This is where meetings tend to go sideways in transcription, people talking over each other while getting settled, someone joining late and repeating themselves, small talk mixed in with the actual start of business. If the first ten minutes reads clean and accurate, the rest usually holds up too. ## If it doesn't work No AI button visible at all? Either the host has switched it off in account settings, or, if you're on Basic, you've used your three summaries this month already. Record locally instead and transcribe it yourself. Summary never arrived? Check the host's email first, then the Zoom web portal under meeting history. It only goes to people the host actively shares it with, so if you weren't on that list, ask directly. Recording file missing after the meeting? Zoom converts local recordings once the meeting ends, and that takes a moment. If you close Zoom immediately, the conversion can get cut off and you lose the file. Wait for it to finish. Hit the 40-minute wall on Basic mid-meeting? Start a second meeting and carry on, or if this keeps happening, get whoever on your team has a paid plan to host instead. And a word on privacy, because it matters more here than people think. The summary and transcript are Zoom's copy of your conversation, sitting on Zoom's systems, not just yours. Before you rely on this for a client meeting or an HR conversation, actually read the host's data retention settings. And never paste a transcript containing anything confidential, medical, legal or financial into a consumer chatbot. The local-recording route at least keeps the audio on your own machine until you decide to move it elsewhere. Tell the room every time you're recording. Every single time, not just the first. ## Questions people ask ### Can I get a Zoom meeting summary on a free Basic account? Yes, but it's capped. On the free Basic plan you get three meeting summaries a month, three uses of AI note-taking, and three meetings where in-meeting questions work. After that it's zero until next month. ### Why can't I see the ZoomMate or AI Companion button? Either the host has switched it off in account settings, or, if you're on Basic, you've already used your three summaries this month. Record locally instead and transcribe it yourself. ### How do I record a Zoom meeting and transcribe it myself? Go to Record, then "Record on this computer." On Basic that gives you an .mp4 and a separate .m4a saved locally. Run the audio through something like MacWhisper on a Mac, which uses the free Whisper model on your own machine, or upload it to an assistant that accepts audio. ### Who gets the Zoom AI meeting summary after the call? The summary lands with the host, either by email or inside the Zoom web portal under meeting history. The host then decides who else gets a copy, so if you were expecting it, ask whoever hosted. ### Is it safe to put a Zoom transcript into an AI chatbot? Never paste a transcript containing anything confidential, medical, legal or financial into a consumer chatbot. The summary and transcript are also Zoom's copy of your conversation, so check the host's data retention settings first, and tell the room every time you're recording. ## Keep exploring If you're trying to do this across different tools rather than just Zoom, the general guide "How to get AI to take meeting notes" covers the same ground without being tied to one platform. If half your meetings happen on Microsoft Teams, there's "How to get AI to take meeting notes in Teams." And if you're mostly on Google Meet, "How to get AI to take meeting notes in Google Meet" walks through that version instead. ## Sources and review notes https://zoom.us/pricing https://www.zoom.com/en/products/ai-assistant/ https://support.zoom.com/hc/en https://www.zoom.com/en/trust/privacy/ https://github.com/openai/whisper https://fireflies.ai/ https://www.granola.ai/ Review date: 2026-09-22