AI meeting notes for Microsoft Teams and Zoom, without a bot

• It shows up as a participant. Clients and external guests ask who it is, and some organizations block unknown guests from joining at all.
• Someone has to admit it from the lobby, which interrupts the start of the call.
• It is easy to forget it's there. A bot that joins every meeting on your calendar records calls you never meant to capture.
• Many companies' security reviews treat "a third party joins our meetings" as a bigger decision than "one person takes notes".

Bots still have a place. If nobody on your side can attend, or you need a recording of a call you are not in, a bot is the right tool. This guide is about the more common case: you are on the call and want help with it.

• Built into the meeting app. Teams and Zoom both offer AI recaps, usually on paid plans and often only for the meetings your organization has enabled it on. Nothing extra joins, but you get what your plan includes.
• A meeting bot. It joins as a participant, records, and sends notes afterwards. Works without you; visible to everyone.
• A browser extension that reads the live captions. It runs on the screen of the person who turns it on, so nothing joins the call and nothing needs admitting.

None is best for every call. Pick by who needs to be told, who is attending and how much you want to capture.

The meeting app already turns speech into live captions for everyone who enables them. An extension reads that caption text and speaker names from the page and sends the text to an AI model to write notes, find decisions and action items, and answer questions while the call is still going.

• Captions must be on. Teams and Zoom both let attendees turn them on, but Zoom's host may need to allow captions first.
• It only works in the browser versions of Teams and Zoom. The desktop apps are not web pages, so an extension can't see them.
• Notes are only as good as the captions. Accents, crosstalk, jargon and poor audio all lower caption accuracy, and the notes inherit that.
• It captures what the person who started it sees. If you leave early, you stop capturing.
• There is no audio or video file, which is a feature for privacy and a limit if you need a recording.

• Tell everyone, in the call. A line in the meeting chat, or out loud at the start, is enough for most internal calls. Do it every time, not only when someone asks.
• Ask first for external calls, clients and anything sensitive. If anyone says no, don't capture.
• Check your local rules. Some places need only one party's consent to record and others need everyone's. Notes taken from captions are still a record of the conversation, so don't assume the rules don't apply.
• Know where the text goes. Check who stores it, how long, and whether it is used to train models.
• Make deleting easy. If someone changes their mind after the call, you should be able to remove the transcript and notes.

A transcript of a call is rarely what anyone wants three days later. What people look for is what was decided, by whom, why, and what happens next. Whatever tool you use, check the notes for four things: the decision in one sentence, the reasoning, an owner for every action and a date for every owner. If the call ended without a decision, the notes should say so plainly rather than inventing one.