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Mastering Meetings: a Comprehensive Guide to AI Meeting Assistants

Learn the benefits of an AI meeting assistant and check out some of the top options today.

Motion Blog
at Motion
Jan 8, 2024
Table of contents

Could your online meetings be smoother?

You’re not alone. Organizing, following up with attendants, taking notes, and trying to remember what needs to be done after the meeting — it’s a lot.

Imagine ideas slipping away, lost in a forest of notes — important tasks forgotten in the rush. Traditional ways don’t work optimally, and we need a better approach.

Introducing AI meeting assistants, the new helper for meetings. It’s like having someone who keeps track of what goes on in meetings, ensures you don’t miss out on critical tasks, and holds an accurate record that you can refer to later.

Read on to find out what AI meeting assistants offer and the top choices in the market to consider.

What is an AI meeting assistant, and what are the benefits?

AI meeting assistants are solutions designed to enhance the overall online meeting experience, from preparation to follow-up. They use artificial intelligence to automate various meeting aspects, leaving you to focus on engaging with the participants during the session.

A handshake between a person and an AI bot

‎Some key benefits of an AI meeting assistant are:

1. Time efficiency

An AI meeting assistant saves time by automating routine tasks in and around online meetings.

They facilitate the creation of meeting agendas through templates and help break down key discussion points.

Some also help with scheduling online meetings and aligning everyone’s calendar.

During the meeting, they capture the discussion points and make it easy to refer to the notes without missing out on anything.

2. Note-taking

AI meeting assistants can transcribe and take notes while discussions are underway. This helps capture key points and make your post-meeting documentation more accurate.

Additionally, they make meetings productive since no points are missed, and it becomes easy to follow up with participants on action items.

3. Create a meeting repository

AI meeting assistants can help create a repository of past meetings so that it’s easier for anyone who wasn’t in the session to get a sense of what was discussed.

With the help of AI, these notes can be summarized and stored to allow people joining the team or a project to search through and find the information they need quickly.

4. Caption generation

AI auto-captioning helps participants follow the conversation keenly, especially when one has a connectivity issue or can't hear the speaker clearly.

Also, it helps people with hearing challenges as they can participate in the session by simply reading through the real-time transcriptions.

What are the features of an AI meeting assistant?

Today, you’ll find multiple AI meeting assistants in the market. With all the buzz around AI, selecting a suitable AI meeting assistant from a crowded marketplace is not easy.

Artificial intelligence depicted in a structure like a human brain

‎Before you run off and assess individual AI meeting assistants, understand the features a good one typically offers.

Some top features to look out for include:

1. Language options

Always check the number of languages any AI meeting assistants support before buying one. This is key to running meetings in different languages or having multilingual teams.

Most AI meeting tools will support the major languages, e.g., English, French, Spanish, and others, but always confirm this.

2. Note-taking capabilities

All AI meeting assistants have some form of note-taking capabilities, but dig deep and see how robust this feature is. Some will just grab the audio and have those as notes, but is this enough for you?

A top AI meeting assistant will analyze the notes, group them into sentiments, pick out key themes, and help you summarize the meeting content.

3. Live meeting transcription

This is another feature that you’ll find in most AI meeting assistants.

Transcription is important as it helps participants to follow conversations easily. One key thing to look out for from this feature is the accuracy and robustness of the transcriptions.

People articulate words differently, and your AI meeting assistant should still transcribe with a reasonable degree of accuracy.

Additionally, check if the AI meeting assistant can summarize the meeting and derive insights from the text.

4. Automated meeting scheduling

Meeting scheduling can be hectic, especially if you have to check with multiple participants and find a time slot that works for everyone.

An AI meeting assistant should help with scheduling by automatically checking all the participants’ calendars and suggesting the best possible times to have the meeting. This heavily relies on how efficiently the tool will integrate with your online collaboration tools such as Google Meet or Microsoft Teams.

5. Meeting analytics

One benefit of AI meeting assistants is their ability to improve online meeting experiences. A top one should share meeting analytics over and above the transcription and content discussed during the session.

Some key data points the tool can give you are average talk time, how many participants contributed to the discussion, and meeting minutes, among others.

6. Integration options with other tools

AI meeting assistants don’t work in isolation and only help improve your experience through the different video conferencing tools.

This way, their integration ability remains a key enabler for them to work for you. Before you select one, check the integration options to see how best the tool works with your existing online collaboration suite.

Also, check the ease of integration and technical support required.

Best AI meeting assistants

Some of the top AI meeting assistants to consider are:

1. Fireflies

Best for cross-functional collaboration

‎Fireflies has a range of AI features that help you with meetings, from scheduling to follow-ups. First, it sorts your meetings by project, team, or topic to give you a bucketed view.

During the meeting, the AI assistant will transcribe what everyone says and follow up to analyze the transcriptions to pick out useful information and run a sentiment analysis.

It follows this up by providing an in-depth analysis of the participants, the amount of time they spoke during the meeting, a comparison of all the participants, and a meeting recap. It also picks key information like metrics and dates from the meeting and highlights them.

Fireflies is ideal for online collaboration, looking at how it breaks down meeting content and ensuring that nothing is missed. Team members can view the video recordings and leave comments, helping to create a robust knowledge base for your team.

Pricing - Fireflies has a free plan, with 800 minutes of storage, with the paid plans starting at $18 per user monthly.

2. Krisp

Best for clear and quality audio

‎Krisp is well-known for its noise-cancellation abilities, but it still has robust AI features, making it an option on this list.

It stands out from the rest by its ability to improve audio quality and allow you to hear participants clearly even when there’s some background noise. On the flip side, you don’t need to worry about your noisy background, as its noise cancellation features will ensure your voice is heard clearly.

Krisp has a very easy-to-use interface that you can easily switch on or off to activate.

The AI transcription features available let you turn meetings into text. This feature is also very easy to use and works with any voice app, with no plugins or extensions required.

The AI engine collects the meeting text and summarizes it into either a short or detailed summary with action items and discussion points.

Pricing - The free plan gives you 60 minutes of clear meetings, two meeting notes, and free transcriptions. Paid plans start at $12 per user monthly.

3. Avoma

Best for meeting analysis

‎Avoma’s value proposition is digging deep into the text collected during a meeting and finding valuable insights for the meeting holder.

Before the meeting, Avoma’s Meeting scheduler helps find the best time to schedule sessions with a few clicks. Also, the templates available will let you prepare meeting agendas in seconds and share them with your participants.

Avoma will capture the meeting recording, transcribe it in real-time, gather notes, capture key moments, and group them as live bookmarks during the meeting. The extensive meeting intelligence system will give you extensive analytics on topics, what you need to focus on, key keywords, questions asked, and areas of focus.

All these analytics are good for leaders looking to coach their teams, supported by the range of coaching tools available on Avoma. These have an AI score that helps new sales teams improve their communication skills.

Pricing - The starter plan costs $24 per user monthly, with the free one allowing up to 1200 minutes per month.

4. Fathom

Best free meeting assistant

‎This is the only free AI meeting assistant on this platform, with no strings attached.

The tool owners want to get more people on board, so they have the free version, which works as well as any paid version for individuals. The plan is to leverage this brand awareness and grow users on their Team Edition product.

Fathom lets you transcribe all your meetings and send the information to your CRM or communication channel of choice. The free edition enables you to transcribe meetings without any limitations.

In addition, you can create a playlist of your meetings made up of short, shareable videos.

The free plan is good and offers all the basic features of a reliable AI meeting assistant. For the advanced features, you’ll need to get on the Team plan, which allows you to see advanced meeting statistics for various participants.

Pricing - Team plan costs $19 per user monthly, with the free version available for individuals.

5. tl;dv

Best for digging deep through large meeting repositories

‎Did you know that the name tl;dv is inspired by the age when forums were the thing, and people would leave a comment, tl;dr to say too long, didn’t read?

Well, now you know, and as the name goes, this AI meeting assistant saves you from reading through thousands of meeting notes and wikis.

It has a powerful search feature that returns a lot of information from your notes simply by keying in a search query.

This is its key selling point, but it also has the regular features expected of an AI meeting assistant, such as conversation intelligence to analyze meetings, live transcriptions in over 25 languages, key meeting alerts for specific topics, and automated meeting notes.

Once you integrate this tool with your video conferencing tool, you get a button that allows it to start working. This is vital if you don’t want to record all your meetings.

Pricing - The free plan is available for unlimited Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet; the paid plan starts at $25 per user monthly.

6. Otter

Best for live and recorded meeting transcription

‎Otter is a robust AI meeting assistant that accurately transcribes meetings into transcripts, among other features. It also helps in search and keyword analysis, voice command control, and speaker identification.

While all the tools above have transcription services, what sets Otter AI apart from the rest is the natural language processing technology used to convert speech into text. With time, you build a custom vocabulary to boost speech-to-text accuracy.

The service can also differentiate between voices based on their characteristics.

Pricing - Otter has a free plan, but the paid ones start at $10 per user monthly.

Say hello to your new AI meeting assistant

Meetings are a key part of productivity, or at least sharing ideas, and the listed AI meeting assistants are great options to consider if you need one.

As you step outside the meeting, you need a productivity tool to help you stay on top of your tasks, beat deadlines, and understand how your projects and other work are progressing.

Motion is a reliable and robust option that creates a personalized schedule for you and your team. Once you input tasks, resources, and priorities, Motion will serve all this up to you and the team on your calendars, integrated with all other work according to everyone’s availability. And adjust it for you when things change.

Take your productivity to the next level with Motion today.

Motion Blog
Written by Motion Blog