How do you record a meeting and get notes automatically?

Meeting notes, summary, recap: same thing or not?

Every tool has its own name for the output: meeting notes, summary, meeting recap. Underneath all these words there are really just two things.

What manual meeting notes cost you

Say a team lead has three calls a week and spends 20 minutes writing up each one. That's an hour a week, or about 48 hours over 48 working weeks.

That's more than a full work week every year spent retelling what everyone already heard.

Step 1. Check what your communication tool already does

Before you add anything new, look at the settings of the tool you already use for calls. A few examples:

• Pachca: automatic call transcription and summaries in a format you can tailor to your team;
• Yandex Telemost: note-taking with Alice Pro. The organizer gets a transcript and a short recap. Available on Yandex 360 business plans and only for accounts on the organization's domain;
• Kontur.Talk: AI transcription with timestamps and automatic meeting notes;
• MTS Link: transcription and automatic meeting summaries;
• SaluteJazz: automatic transcription and a short summary of the discussion;
• Zoom: after the meeting, AI Companion emails the organizer a brief summary, a recap and next steps;
• Microsoft Teams: Intelligent Recap in Copilot pulls together the meeting takeaways. Requires Copilot.

Step 2. No built-in option? Bring in a bot or upload a file

For online meetings, there are bots that act as your note-taker. Otter, Fathom, Fireflies and tl;dv join the call as a visible participant, record it and send a summary afterward. Among Russian tools, mymeet.ai and Speech2Text work the same way: the bot joins the meeting via a link and, once the call ends, sends a transcript split by speaker along with a short recap.

If a bot on the call makes people uneasy, there's an option without one: Granola records audio straight from your computer and, after the meeting, turns your notes into a recap with action items.

For in-person meetings, a phone with a voice recorder in the middle of the table is enough. Then upload the file to a transcription service: Speech2Text, Transkriptor, Charla and others can split the text by speaker and add timestamps.

Two tips from experience:

• pick a service that separates speakers. Without that, the summary can't say who owns what;
• check where the recording goes. If the meeting covers money, clients or plans, go with a service that stores data in Russia, runs on your own servers or encrypts with your own keys (BYOK).

Step 3. Tailor the summary to your team

A default summary is written "for everyone," which means it's written for no one in particular. Teams usually need three things: what was decided, who's doing what and by when, and what's still open.

If your tool lets you customize the format, like Pachca does, set it up once. If it doesn't, give the transcript to a language model along with a template:

Write a summary of this meeting transcript:
1. Decisions: what we agreed to do or not do.
2. Tasks: what, who and by when.
3. Open questions: what we discussed but didn't decide.
If an owner or deadline isn't stated explicitly,
write "not set." Don't make anything up.

Step 4. Send the recap where your team works

This is where automation breaks down most often. Built-in summaries usually land in the organizer's inbox or sit in the service's dashboard. Exactly one person opens them.

Post the recap in the project's chat in your team chat app, where the team already spends its day. It helps to give each task its own thread: the discussion stays next to the decision instead of scattering across DMs. If a task involves someone who wasn't in the meeting, loop them in with an @mention. Pachca has cross-chat threads for exactly this: you can bring any teammate into a thread, even if they're not in that chat.

It works best when calls and messages live in one place. In Pachca, you can start a call right from a chat or a thread, so the conversation, its recap and the task discussion stay together, and there's nothing to forward.