Free AI note takers, limit by limit.

Quick picks

Short version, based on what each free plan says it includes:

• Most free transcription for video calls: Fathom or Fireflies
• A monthly minute allowance with summaries: Otter (300 minutes, 30 minutes per conversation)
• No meeting bot, notes on your laptop: Granola (30 days of history on free)
• In-person meetings and classes, nothing to install on iPhone: Voice Memos
• Korean, English or mixed-language conversations recorded on your phone: NoteCube
• Short voice notes only: Notta’s free plan (3 minutes per recording)

What is the best free AI note taker for Zoom, Google Meet and Teams?

For calls, Fathom has the largest free plan of the eight: its help center lists unlimited recordings, storage and transcripts in 38 languages. The catch is AI. Advanced summaries cover your first 5 calls each month; after that you get the General template, and Ask Fathom, AI action items and follow-up emails are Premium features.

Fireflies transcribes meetings its bot joins without a minute cap, but it spends credits to summarize a meeting, gives 400 minutes of storage per seat and needs a paid plan to download transcripts. Otter covers 300 minutes a month with summaries included, which fits shorter meetings: on the free Basic plan each conversation stops at 30 minutes. Read AI is the tightest for regular use, with 5 transcripts a month and meetings up to an hour.

Free AI note takers that work without a bot

Some people don’t want a recorder joining the call, or the meeting isn’t a call at all. Granola captures audio on your own device instead of sending a bot, and its free Basic plan keeps 30 days of meeting history. Voice Memos and NoteCube record through the phone’s microphone, so they work in a meeting room, a classroom or a coffee shop.

Recording the room has its own limits. A phone on the table hears the people near it best, and a recording made this way has no access to the call’s participant list, so speakers are labeled from the audio, not from names in Zoom.

Free AI note takers for in-person meetings and Korean

Voice Memos is the free option already on an iPhone: it shows a transcript on iOS 18 or later and iPhone 12 or later, in 10 languages including English, Spanish and Korean, though not in every country or region. It does not mark speakers or write meeting notes.

NoteCube writes the transcript live in Korean, English or a mix of both, with speakers and timestamps, and turns a meeting into a summary, decisions and to-dos taken from what was said. Its free allowance is smaller than the call tools above: the first 60 cumulative minutes of transcription, once, not every month. Summaries of transcribed content are free on every plan, and recording has no time limit. If the free minutes run out mid-meeting, the recording keeps going and only the live transcript stops.

What free plans usually leave out

Across the eight, the limits fall into a few patterns. Check these before you move your team onto a free plan:

• Length caps: Otter stops at 30 minutes per conversation, Read AI at 1 hour, Notta at 3 minutes per recording
• Summary caps: Fathom’s advanced summaries (5 calls a month), Notta (10 a month), Fireflies (credits)
• History and storage: Granola keeps 30 days, Fireflies 400 minutes per seat
• Exports and search: Fireflies charges to download transcripts; Otter allows 20 AI chat questions a month