How do I use AI to summarize meeting notes
Paste your raw meeting notes or transcript into an AI assistant like ChatGPT or Claude and ask it to pull out decisions, action items, and owners. For recurring meetings, use a dedicated notetaker like Otter.ai or Fathom that records, transcribes, and summarizes automatically without anyone taking notes. The whole thing takes under two minutes per meeting once you've got a prompt you like.
The manual route works fine and costs nothing. After the meeting, dump whatever you scribbled — bullet fragments, half-sentences, typos and all — into ChatGPT or Claude with a prompt like: "Summarize these meeting notes into three sections: decisions made, action items with owners and due dates, and open questions." Specifying the output structure is the whole trick. Ask for "a summary" and you get a paragraph nobody reads. Ask for owners and due dates and you get something you can actually forward to the team. If you're doing this for the same weekly meeting over and over, automate the capture too. Otter.ai and Fathom join your Zoom, Teams, or Google Meet calls, transcribe everyone in real time, and email a summary with action items before you've closed your laptop. Fathom is free for unlimited recordings on the individual plan, which makes it hard to argue with. Otter has a stronger search function across your whole meeting history — useful when you need to find what someone committed to three weeks ago. A few things that trip people up. AI notetakers hear everything, so tell attendees you're recording — in some states that's a legal requirement, not a courtesy. Speaker labels get mangled when people talk over each other, so spot-check who was assigned what before you send the summary out. And the summary quality depends heavily on audio quality; one person on a bad connection will produce garbage transcription for their entire contribution. Start with the manual paste-into-ChatGPT approach for a week before you buy anything. You'll figure out what you actually want the summary to contain, and that prompt becomes the spec for whichever tool you eventually pick. Most people discover they don't need a full transcript — they need five lines of "who owes what by when," and a good prompt gets you there for free.