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.

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 judgement 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 summarised is often cut short before the meeting is.

The built-in option on a paid plan

If your organisation already pays for Zoom Workplace, the built-in AI is the lowest-friction option by a wide margin. No extra licence, 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.

Its limitation is the obvious one: it only knows about Zoom. Phone calls, in-person conversations, calls on Teams or Meet, and the thinking you do between meetings are all invisible to it. If your meeting life is genuinely all in Zoom, that is not a limitation at all.

Quality is the thing to test rather than read about. Built-in summaries tend toward a faithful recap; dedicated tools tend to push harder on extracting commitments with owners attached. 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 work by joining the meeting as a participant and recording it. Current free tiers, from each provider's own pricing page:

Fathom has the most generous free plan of the group: unlimited recordings and transcriptions, a choice of bot-free capture (in beta) or a meeting bot, instant AI call summaries, and clips, playlists and search across calls. 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.

Fireflies advertises unlimited transcription on its free plan, with the constraint moved to storage: 400 minutes per team, and 20 AI credits. Paid tiers are $10 per seat a month annually for Pro, $19 for Business with unlimited storage, and $39 for Enterprise. The per-team storage allowance matters — it divides as colleagues join rather than multiplying.

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 organisation let a bot join the call?

Every tool in the section above works by adding a participant to the meeting. It is visible to everyone on the call, it is recorded in the participant list, and a great many organisations have a policy that prohibits exactly that — sometimes for confidentiality, sometimes because consent gets complicated when a vendor's software is a party to the conversation.

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 where you work, the built-in Zoom AI is permitted because it is not a third party, and the only other route is to work from the recording yourself.

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.

That local file is all transcription needs. You can transcribe it free in your browser — no account, no minute cap, and the recording is never uploaded, because the speech model downloads into the page and runs on your own machine. Use the .m4a rather than the .mp4: it holds everything transcription needs and is far smaller, so it processes faster.

That route works on any plan, adds no participant to the call, and is the one option that is unaffected by both the licence question and the bot policy. The step-by-step version is in transcribing a Zoom meeting to text free.

When Zoom-only tools are not enough

Every option above — built-in or bot — covers scheduled Zoom calls and nothing else.

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 semantic search across everything you capture, 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 organisations prohibit this. If yours does, the built-in Zoom AI is still available to you, and so is transcribing your own recording afterwards.

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 Zoom-only workflows on a paid plan, built-in wins on friction and on policy — no bot, no extra vendor, no new storage location. Third-party tools tend to be stronger at extracting commitments and at searching across a long history of calls. If a meaningful part of your meeting life happens outside Zoom, neither answer is complete on its own.