Do You Already Have an AI Note-taker?

Intelligent recap is produced by Teams itself. Nothing joins the meeting and nothing is captured on the participant's machine — the meeting service transcribes its own call and builds the recap from that. For organisations that already record meetings, that is the least intrusive arrangement available.

The output is good: AI-generated notes and suggested tasks, speaker timeline markers, automatically generated chapters and topics, and personalised markers for when your name was mentioned. Everything lands inside Microsoft 365 where the rest of the work already is.

The catch is access. Two things stand between you and it. The first is licensing: recap needs a Microsoft 365 subscription including Teams, plus either a Teams Premium or a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence, and an administrator has to turn on transcription and recording through policy. Nobody reaches this on their own. The second is language coverage — multilingual speech recognition supports nine languages, and Dutch is not among them. On privacy the commitments are unusually concrete: data stays in your tenant's region, multi-geo is supported, and customer content is never logged or used for training.

Zoom's assistant was called AI Companion and is now ZoomMate; the old product URL returns a not-found page. Anyone comparing tools from a list written six months ago will be looking for the wrong name, which is worth knowing before you go searching.

The commercial shape is unusual and favourable. A limited set of features is included with Workplace Basic — meeting summaries for three hosted meetings a month, in-meeting questions for the same, twenty AI queries — so a Zoom user can try it without buying anything. The full product starts at twenty dollars per user per month with AI credits included.

The thing to weigh is that everything here assumes you meet on Zoom. What genuinely separates it is Zoom AI On-Prem, which deploys the AI capabilities inside infrastructure the customer controls. For regulated industries that is a different category of answer from a data-residency promise, and on-premises deployment is rare in this category. Language coverage is documented per feature rather than once for the product: thirty-two languages for meeting summary, with chat summary and call summary each carrying their own list.

Google's note-taking runs inside Meet and needs no extra tool. Where an organisation is already on Workspace and an administrator has enabled it, notes can start automatically for chosen meetings and land beside the calendar event without anyone doing anything.

The consent handling is the standout. An administrator can require all participants to give explicit consent before the feature is used, and the setting is off unless deliberately turned on. In a category where the etiquette of recording is still unsettled, having that enforced by the platform rather than by convention is worth something.

The cost is coverage, and it is more restrictive than its reputation suggests. The feature is generally available in English only; French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish are offered to beta users. It handles one language per meeting, and the documentation states plainly that multiple languages spoken in the same meeting are not currently supported. It also requires an eligible Workspace edition or Google AI plan, and a work or school account.