Best AI Meeting Assistant for Zoom (2026)

If you have searched this recently you will have found a lot of advice about "Zoom AI Companion". That name no longer exists, and the change is recent enough that most of what is written about it is now describing a product by a name Zoom has stopped using.

Meetings Brief processing choice: The device-only instructions below require On this device. Live notes also offer Online with Groq when available: selected audio leaves your device in short batches after your processing choice, with shared limits. Online is available for existing recordings: audio goes through private Supabase upload storage to the provider named before upload (Cloudflare Workers AI or Groq), subject to shared usage limits. Check permissions and privacy; AI briefs separately send transcript text to Anthropic.

Start there, because it determines what you are actually choosing between.

What happened to Zoom AI Companion

Zoom retired the AI Companion brand in June 2026. Nothing was taken away — the capabilities were renamed for what they do and folded into the product.

In Zoom's own words: "Meeting summaries, smart compose, transcription, call summaries, voicemail prioritization — all the capabilities that used to carry the AI Companion name are still built right into Zoom Workplace." And: "Eligible paid Zoom Workplace plans continue to include core AI features at no additional cost."

Alongside that, Zoom introduced ZoomMate, described as an agentic product that builds on Custom AI Companion and "acts on meeting context to complete work automatically". ZoomMate is a separate add-on, sold per user per month, with 2,200 AI credits included each month.

So the decision has three options rather than two:

1. The AI features included with a paid Zoom Workplace plan
2. ZoomMate, as a paid add-on on top of that
3. A third-party assistant that joins the call

What you get free

Zoom Workplace Basic includes a limited ZoomMate Basic tier. The allowances are specific, and worth reading before you plan around them:

• Meeting summaries for 3 hosted meetings per month
• In-meeting questions for 3 hosted meetings per month
• AI note-taking (My Notes), for Zoom and third-party meeting platforms, 3 uses per month
• AI queries, 20 per month
• Agentic search across 10 total files and 3 meetings
• Workflows running in Zoom applications only, 10 runs per month

Three summaries a month is an evaluation budget. It is enough to form a judgment about quality and not enough to run a working week on.

The other thing to know about Basic is the meeting limit itself: group meetings are capped at 40 minutes, so the recording you would want summarized is often cut short before the meeting is. For taking your own notes on the call instead, as host or participant, see how to take notes during a Zoom call.

The built-in option on a paid plan

If your organization already pays for Zoom Workplace, the built-in AI is the lowest-friction option by a wide margin. No extra license, no bot in the participant list, no separate vendor review, no new place for recordings to live, and it inherits whatever retention and compliance settings your admin has already configured.

Distinguish the in-meeting summary from Zoom's My Notes capture mode. The former summarizes a Zoom meeting; My Notes also supports third-party meeting platforms. Check which mode and allowance your plan provides.

Quality is the thing to test rather than read about. Check both the built-in summary and a third-party tool for correct decisions, commitments, owners and dates. Which you prefer is a matter of what you do with the output, and twenty minutes with a real recording from your own team will tell you more than any comparison table.

Third-party assistants that join Zoom calls

These products offer bot-based capture, and some also offer botless modes. Current free tiers, from each provider's own pricing page:

Fathom lists unlimited recordings and transcriptions, basic AI call summaries, clips, playlists and search across calls on Free. Its pricing footnote limits bot-free capture to a Mac beta; check the supported route for your device. The line to notice is one tier up — AI-generated action items and advanced summaries are Premium, at $20 a month or $16 billed annually. Free gives you the record and the recap; the follow-ups are paid.

Otter.ai has long-standing Zoom integration and a good mobile app. The free Basic plan is 300 transcription minutes a month, capped at 30 minutes per conversation, keeping your 25 most recent conversations, with 3 file imports for the life of the account. Pro is $8.33 per user a month billed annually or $16.99 monthly; Business is $19.99 annually, $30 monthly (list prices on Otter's pricing page, checked 7 Oct 2026). For a head-to-head on transcripts, prices and privacy, see Otter vs Zoom AI Companion.

Fireflies advertises unlimited transcription on its free plan (with auto-join on; otherwise 3 meetings for accounts opened since September 1, 2026), with the constraint moved to storage: limited storage and advanced AI credits. Paid tiers are $10 per seat a month annually for Pro, $19 for Business with unlimited storage, and $39 for Enterprise. Confirm the storage allocation in your account: Fireflies' pricing page says per team, while its free-plan help page says per seat.

All three are competent. The differences between them matter less than the question in the next section.

The question that decides it in most companies

Will your organization let a bot join the call?

Their bot-based modes add a visible participant. Other modes differ: Otter documents botless desktop capture, and Fathom lists bot-free capture in beta. Check approval for the capture mode and vendor you will actually use.

This is worth checking before the pricing page, not after. It is the most common reason a carefully chosen tool is bought and then never used.

If bots are blocked, check whether your organization approves Zoom's built-in AI, a vendor's botless mode or local transcription of a recording. Meetings Brief can also capture a Zoom tab in desktop Chrome or Edge through live transcription. Every route still needs the relevant recording and data-processing permissions.

When the recording is what you have

Zoom's own transcription applies to cloud recordings, and cloud recording is a paid feature. On the free Basic plan you can still record locally, which produces an .m4a audio file and an .mp4 video file in your Zoom folder.

On this device: That local file is all transcription needs. You can transcribe it free in your browser — no account, no minute limit, and the recording is never uploaded, because the speech model downloads into the page and runs on your own machine. Choose the .m4a if it contains all the voices you need; it avoids carrying video data. Play a sample first. Actual processing speed still depends on the file, model and device, so a smaller file is not a speed guarantee.

With a recording you are allowed to use, that route adds no participant and does not require Zoom's cloud-transcription license. Recording, retention and device-use policies still apply. The step-by-step version is in transcribing a Zoom meeting to text free.

When Zoom-only tools are not enough

A bot joining a Zoom invitation covers that scheduled call. Other capture modes, including Zoom My Notes and Otter's desktop app, can cover conversations outside Zoom; compare those separately from calendar-bot features.

For a lot of professionals that is a fraction of where the important information actually appears: phone calls, conversations in a corridor, client meetings in a room, and the thought you have in a car park that will be gone in ninety seconds. A tool that only listens to scheduled video calls will never see any of it.

Meetings Brief is built for that gap — voice capture in 13 languages, AI summaries in six formats, automatic action items, and AI search of your most recent notes, free and without an account. It does not put a bot in your Zoom calls; it covers the rest of the day, and transcribes recordings you already have.

What to evaluate before deciding

Bot policy first. It removes options faster than price does.

Action items, not summaries. Nearly everything produces a recap. Far fewer produce a list of commitments with owners and dates that you would actually send to the room. Check which tier that sits in — on more than one tool here it is the paid one.

Where the recording lives, and for how long. Retention defaults differ, and a transcript you cannot retrieve in six months is a live utility rather than a record.

Training on your content. Check the privacy policy for language about improving services using customer data. It is more common on free tiers than paid ones.

Everything that is not a Zoom call. If a meaningful share of your important conversations happen off-platform, decide now whether you want one system for all of it or are content with a gap.

Frequently asked questions

Does Zoom have its own AI transcription?

Yes. Meeting summaries, transcription and call summaries are built into Zoom Workplace, and eligible paid Zoom Workplace plans include the core AI features at no additional cost. They used to be branded AI Companion; Zoom retired that name in June 2026 and now names the features for what they do.

Is Zoom AI Companion still available?

The name is not — Zoom retired it in June 2026. The capabilities did not go away; they are built into Zoom Workplace under plainer names. The separate agentic product Zoom introduced alongside the change is called ZoomMate, sold as a paid add-on per user per month with 2,200 AI credits included monthly.

What AI does Zoom give you free?

Zoom Workplace Basic includes ZoomMate Basic: meeting summaries and in-meeting questions for 3 hosted meetings per month each, AI note-taking for 3 uses per month, 20 AI queries per month, agentic search across 10 files and 3 meetings, and 10 workflow runs per month. Basic group meetings are also capped at 40 minutes.

Do third-party tools show up as extra participants in a Zoom call?

Yes. Bot-based services join as a visible participant, which is recorded in the participant list. Many organizations prohibit this. If yours does, check which built-in, botless or post-recording methods your organization approves and your account supports.

Can I get a transcript of a Zoom call I forgot to record?

No. If nothing was capturing audio, there is no transcript to recover. If you did record locally, the .m4a in your Zoom folder can be transcribed afterwards even though no transcript was generated at the time.

Which is better, the built-in AI or a third-party assistant?

For a Zoom-only workflow, first check what your existing plan and administrator allow. Compare its output with an approved alternative using the same permitted sample, including decisions, owners, dates and retrieval. This guide has not measured a quality or usability winner. Also check capture options for conversations outside Zoom.