How do I use AI to summarize meeting notes
Paste your raw meeting notes or transcript into an AI assistant like ChatGPT, Claude, or Notion AI and ask it to extract decisions, action items with owners, and open questions. For recurring meetings, use a dedicated notetaker like Otter.ai or Fireflies.ai that joins the call, transcribes automatically, and emails a summary within minutes of the meeting ending.
The quality of an AI summary depends almost entirely on how you ask for it. A vague prompt like "summarize this" gives you a shorter version of the same wall of text. Instead, ask for structure: "Extract three sections — decisions made, action items with the person responsible and any deadline mentioned, and unresolved questions. Ignore small talk." That single change turns a summary into something you can actually forward to the team. For live meetings, automatic notetakers save the most time. Otter.ai and Fireflies.ai connect to Zoom, Google Meet, and Teams, join the call as a participant, and produce a transcript plus an AI summary without anyone taking notes. Both have free tiers that cover a few hundred minutes a month, which is usually enough for a small business testing the workflow. Fireflies leans toward sales teams with CRM integrations; Otter is simpler and better for general internal meetings. If you already write notes by hand or in a doc, a general assistant works fine and costs less. Paste the notes in, use the structured prompt above, and keep a saved version of that prompt so you're not rewriting it every week. Notion AI is worth a look if your notes already live in Notion — it summarizes in place, so the output stays attached to the original page instead of living in a chat window you'll lose track of. Two cautions. First, always read the action items before sending them out. AI reliably invents an owner or a deadline when the transcript was ambiguous, and a wrong deadline in writing causes more problems than no notes at all. Second, tell attendees when a bot is recording. Some states require consent from all parties, and beyond the legal question, people speak differently when they discover after the fact that a transcript exists.