AI Note-takers With Retention Controls

Circleback is unusually restrained. The marketing site is nearly bare and the product follows suit: what you get after a meeting is a short set of decisions and action items rather than a long document to skim. Search and questions run across every conversation you have had, and automations can fire once a meeting ends.

Its strongest suit is disclosure. The company is SOC 2 Type II and EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework certified, commits that customer content never feeds model training, gives workspace administrators control over how long meeting data is kept, and publishes its security portal openly, including a report from an external penetration test — where a request form is the more common arrangement.

Coverage is broad, with over a hundred languages advertised and the list actually published, plus in-person recording on the individual plan. The cost is the entry price: there is no free plan to sit on, and Slack support arrives on the team tier. For a small team that wants short notes and a straight answer about security, that may be a fair trade.

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.

Fireflies sends a recorder into the meeting and gets out of the way. It can be invited to a single call or set to join everything on your calendar, and once it is running the output lands wherever you have pointed it — a chat channel, a CRM record, or another system through the API.

What makes it worth a close look is where the paywall sits. Unlimited transcription, unlimited summaries, live notes, meeting search, the assistant that answers questions about past calls, and API access are all on the free plan. The cap is storage rather than usage: four hundred minutes of recordings for the whole team, after which older meetings have to be deleted to make room. Paid tiers raise that and add integrations, conversation analytics and administrative controls.

The thing to weigh is what happens to the data afterwards. The vendor states that meeting data never feeds AI model training and describes a zero-day retention arrangement with its own vendors. It holds SOC 2 Type II and GDPR, and HIPAA with a business associate agreement on the enterprise tier. Custom data retention is an advanced-tier control rather than a default.

Fellow treats a meeting as something with a beginning rather than only a recording. Agendas, notes and follow-ups sit in one place, and the AI recap is attached to a structure rather than produced in isolation. For recurring meetings — one-to-ones, team syncs, anything with continuity — that changes what the notes are for.

Templates are a real part of the product: purpose-built AI note templates for one-to-ones, sales calls, project syncs, interviews and all-hands, with custom templates you can author yourself. Organisation-wide templates arrive on the business tier, along with multi-calendar sync on enterprise.

The privacy position is stated plainly: Fellow never trains its AI on customer data, and offers granular recording policies for controlling what is captured and when. The cost is a gap in disclosure: no transcription language list exists publicly, leaving coverage unrecorded and the entry outside the language filters. For an English-speaking team that is immaterial; for anyone else it is worth asking before committing.

Bluedot records without putting a participant in your meeting, and leads with privacy in its own marketing. That combination is becoming less rare, but the way it draws its pricing tiers still is.

Bluedot draws its tiers the other way round from the usual arrangement. Slack, Notion, Zapier and Make connections are on the free plan, while custom note templates wait until Pro and CRM and applicant-tracking integrations until Business. If your bottleneck is getting notes in front of a team rather than shaping how they read, that is the more useful way round.

Webhook access starts on the Basic tier, with organisation-wide webhooks and MCP on Business. The catch is silence on languages: Bluedot names no transcription list anywhere public, so its coverage is unrecorded here and the language filters pass it by. For a team working in English with a Slack habit and a dislike of meeting bots, it is a comfortable fit; anyone who needs a specific language should ask first.

Granola is a desktop application rather than a meeting participant. You open it, press start, and type whatever you would have typed anyway; it listens to your microphone and your computer's audio at the same time and keeps a transcript alongside your notes. When the call ends it writes a summary from both, which is a different product from one that summarises a recording you never looked at.

The trade-off is stated plainly by the vendor: it will not join or record anything on its own. That costs you the meetings you forget to start it for, and buys you a tool that never appears in someone else's participant list. For a lot of people that is the whole argument, and it is why the free plan is worth taking seriously — it carries chat across your past meetings alongside custom note templates, a pairing most vendors hold back.

The cost is real, and it is about data rather than features. Everything is stored on AWS in the United States with no regional option, notes and transcripts are kept indefinitely unless an administrator configures otherwise, and anonymised data is used for training until you turn that off in settings. Audio itself is deleted once transcription finishes.

Fathom's pitch is that the free plan is not a trial. Unlimited recordings, unlimited storage and unlimited transcription in thirty-eight languages are all included without payment, and the vendor says explicitly that you are under no obligation to upgrade when the premium preview ends. What the free plan does limit is the advanced summaries: five calls a month, after which you get the general template.

The capture choice is the other thing worth knowing. Fathom can send a bot into the call or record without one, with the bot-free mode currently marked as being in beta. That flexibility matters because the two approaches fail differently — a bot is visible to everyone in the room, and device capture depends on the machine you are sitting at.

The catch is that the intelligence, not the recording, is what the free plan meters. Paid tiers add advanced summaries without a monthly cap, a conversational assistant, and on the business tier a CRM sync that updates records after meetings rather than simply linking back to them. Highlights can be pushed into a chat channel as the meeting happens. Mandarin is absent from the language list despite the count of thirty-eight.

Read AI produces a meeting report rather than a set of notes. Alongside the transcript and summary it measures engagement and sentiment, breaks the dialogue out by speaker, and shows an in-meeting dashboard while the call is still running. Whether that is insight or noise depends entirely on what you are trying to do with it.

Coverage is a strength. Twenty-six languages are enumerated for meeting reports, and in-person meetings, live events and mobile capture are all documented rather than implied. The one documented limit is mixed-language meetings, which the vendor says are not fully supported and may produce inconsistent results.

The thing to weigh is location. On privacy it sits in the middle, honestly documented. Data is stored encrypted in an Amazon data centre in Northern Virginia, with other locations available only by arrangement through the sales team. Retention is genuinely in the user's hands: you choose whether audio and video are saved for playback, and if you decline, nothing beyond what is needed to produce the report is retained. Premium integrations covering Salesforce, HubSpot and webhooks sit on a paid tier.

Tactiq works as a browser extension rather than a participant or an application. It reads the live captions your meeting platform is already producing, which is why the transcript appears in real time and why nothing shows up in the participant list. It also explains the product's most unusual piece of documentation.

Because it depends on the platform's own speech recognition, what Tactiq can transcribe varies by where you are meeting. The vendor publishes a separate language list for Google Meet, Microsoft Teams and Zoom rather than one list for the product. That is more honest than a single headline number, and it is worth checking the list for the platform your team actually uses rather than the aggregate.

The cost is volume and dependence. The free plan allows ten transcripts a month with five AI credits, which makes it a genuine trial rather than a running tool. Pro lifts transcripts to unlimited, team tiers add sharing and centralised administration, and data retention controls arrive on Business. A HubSpot connection is documented as a self-serve setup with no plan requirement stated.